Rewiring Sales Training: How Vinit Shah Builds Systems That Actually Stick
If you’ve ever walked out of a sales training fired up, only to find that nothing really changed a few weeks later, you’re not alone. Most sales organizations invest heavily in training, but the impact fades fast. Why? Because skills don’t stick without systems, accountability, and leadership that truly understands how behavior change works.
In a recent episode of The Art and Science of Complex Sales, host Paul Fuller sat down with Vinit Shah, founder of the London School of Sales, to unpack exactly why traditional sales training so often fails—and what to do differently. Their conversation ranges from Vinit’s unconventional path into sales to the specific structures and habits that turn training into lasting performance.
From “Accidental” Salesperson to Sales Educator
Like many high-performing sellers, Vinit didn’t start his career dreaming of a quota. His background spans manufacturing, market research, and eventually sales leadership. That diversity of experience became a huge advantage: instead of seeing sales as a standalone function, he understood it as part of a broader business system.
Over time, he noticed a pattern. Teams would attend training, absorb new ideas, and then return to the same environment, with the same pressures, the same metrics, and the same habits. Unsurprisingly, very little changed. That frustration pushed him to launch the London School of Sales, with a mission to create sales training that is practical, grounded, and designed to stick.
Why Most Sales Training Fails to Stick
Vinit and Paul dig into a painful truth: the problem isn’t usually the workshop itself. It’s everything that happens before and after it.
1. Training is treated as an event, not a process
Many organizations see training as a one-off fix—”We’ll send the team on a two-day course and that should sort it.” But complex sales skills, like discovery, negotiation, and opportunity management, are built over time. Without repetition, coaching, and reflection, even the best content evaporates.
When sales training is disconnected from everyday workflows, it becomes a box-ticking exercise instead of a driver of performance.
2. Leaders don’t change their own behavior
Another key reason sales training fails is that managers keep doing what they’ve always done. Reps are taught one thing in the classroom, but coached on something entirely different in pipeline reviews and one-to-ones.
For example, if a team is trained to ask deeper discovery questions, but every forecast meeting still revolves around “When is this closing?” and “How big is the deal?”, then the message is clear: activity and dates matter more than quality of conversation. Over time, reps revert to the behavior that gets rewarded.
3. There’s no system to reinforce new habits
Lasting behavior change needs structure. That means:
- Clear expectations around how new skills should show up in calls, meetings, and CRM.
- Templates, checklists, or playbooks that make the new behavior easier than the old one.
- Regular coaching conversations where managers listen to calls, review opportunities, and give targeted feedback.
Without these supports, reps are essentially asked to “just remember” to do something different, while under pressure to hit numbers. It’s a recipe for inconsistency and frustration.
How Leaders Unintentionally Set Their Teams Up to Fail
One of the most valuable parts of the conversation is Vinit’s focus on sales leadership. Many sales managers genuinely want their teams to succeed, but the way they operate quietly undermines that goal.
Promoting top reps without developing managers
It’s a familiar story: a star salesperson is promoted into management with little or no formal training. Overnight, their job shifts from “close deals” to “enable others to close deals”—but the metrics don’t always change.
These new managers often default to what they know: jumping into deals, solving problems for reps, and focusing heavily on numbers. Coaching, skill development, and long-term growth become afterthoughts.
Confusing activity with effectiveness
Vinit highlights another trap: over-indexing on activity metrics. Dials, demos, and meetings do matter, but more is not always better. If a rep has 20 poorly qualified opportunities clogging their pipeline, adding 10 more doesn’t help.
High-performing sales organizations focus on quality: quality of conversations, quality of qualification, and quality of alignment between the customer’s problem and the proposed solution. That requires leaders to ask richer questions and push for depth, not just volume.
Skipping the “why” behind the methodology
When companies adopt a new sales methodology or CRM-driven process, they often roll it out as a set of rules. Reps are told what to fill in, what stage to select, and which fields are mandatory—but not why the process exists in the first place.
Vinit argues that if reps don’t understand the intent behind the system, it will feel like admin overhead rather than a tool to help them win more often. Explaining the “why” behind qualification criteria, opportunity stages, and decision-makers transforms a rigid process into a shared language for better selling.
Building High-Performing Sales Systems
The heart of Vinit’s approach is simple but powerful: stop treating sales performance as a collection of individual heroics, and start thinking in terms of systems.
Connect training to the real sales environment
Effective sales enablement starts with understanding the day-to-day reality of your reps:
- What types of conversations are they having?
- Where do deals typically stall?
- Which skills, if improved, would move the needle most?
Training should map directly to these moments. Rather than generic “closing skills,” focus on, say, navigating complex stakeholder landscapes in enterprise accounts, or running discovery that uncovers real business impact.
Use tools and process to reinforce behavior
CRM and sales technology should support the way you want people to sell, not just capture data. That might mean:
- Embedding qualification questions into opportunity records.
- Defining clear exit criteria for each stage of the sales process.
- Using playbooks within your CRM or sales platform to guide reps through complex opportunities.
When your tools mirror your methodology, every opportunity update becomes a mini training moment.
Make coaching a non-negotiable habit
Coaching is where theory turns into execution. Vinit emphasizes that coaching can’t be an occasional, ad-hoc activity—it needs to be built into the rhythm of the team. That might look like:
- Weekly one-to-ones focused on skill development, not just numbers.
- Regular call listening sessions with specific themes (e.g., discovery, handling objections).
- Deal reviews that look at strategy and stakeholder mapping, not just close dates.
Over time, this kind of structured coaching culture rewires how a team thinks about selling. Reps stop relying on luck and start relying on process.
Rewiring Sales for the Long Term
The conversation between Paul Fuller and Vinit Shah is a reminder that world-class sales performance is rarely about a single “magic” tactic. It’s about aligning people, process, and leadership around a shared way of selling—and then reinforcing that alignment every day.
If your team has been through countless trainings with little visible impact, it may be time to step back and ask different questions: How are we leading? What systems support or sabotage the behaviors we say we want? And how can we turn training from an isolated event into an integrated part of how we sell?
Rewiring sales isn’t quick, but it’s absolutely possible. Start by treating training as the beginning of a journey, not the end—and by equipping your leaders to be coaches, not just scorekeepers.
To dive deeper into these ideas and hear Vinit’s full story, including his experiences across manufacturing, market research, and sales education, listen to the full episode of The Art and Science of Complex Sales featuring Vinit Shah, founder of the London School of Sales.
