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Sales Training Programs
Built Around Your Sale.
Four corporate sales training programs for teams of one to fifty-plus — objection handling intensives, full systematic selling process builds, in-person field ride-alongs, and ongoing coaching retainers. Every one includes the Do The Right Thing Sales Perfect Training Course. Nothing here is off the shelf: it is built from recordings of your actual calls, in your buyer's actual vocabulary.
What Is Your Close Rate Actually Costing You?
Published benchmarks put the effect of effective sales training at roughly a four-to-eight point improvement in win rate. Move the sliders to your real numbers and see what those points are worth in your business. Everything runs in your browser.
Real conversations with someone who could actually buy — not dials, not emails.
Closed-won divided by qualified opportunities. If you do not track it, estimate low.
Benchmark range from published sales-training research is 4–8 points. Slide it down if you want to be conservative.
Discount comes off at full margin. This is usually the most surprising number on this page.
Your numbers
This models the same leads, the same market, and the same spend — only the conversations change. It deliberately excludes shorter ramp time, lower rep turnover, and larger average deal size, all of which published research associates with effective training. It is the conservative version.
Get a program built for these numbers →Benchmark note: published sales-training benchmarks put win rate at 20–30% in B2B SaaS, 25–40% in services, and 15–25% in complex sales, with effective training improving win rate by four to eight points. Your mileage depends entirely on execution and reinforcement, which is the whole argument of the next section.
What The Research Actually Says About Sales Training
Most sales training does not work. That is not cynicism, it is the finding, and any trainer who does not open with it is hoping you have not read the literature. Consulting firm ES Research has put the failure rate at 85 to 90 percent — that share of sales training does not translate into lasting productivity improvement. RAIN Group's research found only 33% of companies rate their own sales training as highly effective.
So the honest question is not whether sales training works. It is what separates the tenth that does from the ninety percent that does not. Every design decision in the programs below comes from that question.
The concentration problem
There is one finding here that should worry every owner reading this. Objective Management Group analyzed 318 sales teams and found that 30% of them relied on a single salesperson for more than half of their revenue, with top producers generating on average ten times what bottom producers generate.
Read that again as a risk statement rather than a performance statement. Nearly a third of sales organizations are one resignation away from losing half their revenue. And because that person's method lives in their head rather than in a document, it leaves when they do. That is not a sales problem — it is an enterprise value problem, and it is the single most common reason a business sells for a lower multiple than the owner expected.
The same research points at where the recoverable upside sits: salespeople in the lower-middle quartile contributed about 8% of team revenue while the upper-middle quartile contributed 16%. Doubling the contribution of your middle performers is a bigger and far more achievable win than trying to clone your best one.
The number every sales trainer quotes — and why I will not
“Reps forget 87% of training within 30 days.”
You have seen this on a slide. It is in vendor decks, LinkedIn posts, and conference keynotes. There is no study behind it — the trail runs from one vendor's blog to another, each citing the other, occasionally gesturing at “research by Xerox” with no publication, sample size, year, or methodology anyone can produce. The same goes for its cousins: 84% lost after 90 days, 70% forgotten in a week.
The honest citation is Murre and Dros (2015), published in PLOS ONE, who properly replicated Ebbinghaus's original 1885 memory experiments. Their replication found 47.2% retained after twenty minutes, 23.0% after two days, and 4.1% after a month. Real numbers, real methodology, and considerably more dramatic than the fake one — but from a single subject memorizing nonsense syllables, which is not the same as a salesperson learning to handle a price objection.
Here is why this matters to you rather than just to pedants. Will Thalheimer's review of the forgetting literature covered 69 experimental conditions and more than a thousand learners, and found forgetting ranged from 0% to 94% depending entirely on the material, the context, and whether the learner ever used the thing again.
Zero to ninety-four percent. That range is the actual insight, and it is far more useful than any single scary percentage. Retention is not a fixed property of human memory that training must fight. It is a variable that program design controls. Material that is relevant, practiced, and actually used gets retained. Material delivered once in a ballroom and never touched again does not. The failure rate is a design failure, not a biology problem.
Retention over time
Solid line: measured retention without reinforcement (Murre & Dros 2015 replication of Ebbinghaus). Dashed line: the shape reinforcement produces — each review flattens the curve. The gap between them is what a program is actually buying.
This chart is the entire argument for how these programs are structured. A two-day workshop puts you on the red line. Every one of the four programs below is designed to keep you on the green one, which is why they all include reinforcement mechanics rather than ending on the last day of the event.
The Do The Right Thing Sales Perfect Training Course
My premium sales training course, built on a question a salesperson should be able to answer before every close: is this actually going to help this person?
If the answer is yes, move forward with everything you have. If the answer is no, stop. That is the whole foundation, and every technique in the course sits on top of it.
Most sales training starts with technique and never reaches ethics. This one starts with ethics and earns the right to teach technique — not out of sentimentality, but because the techniques only work reliably when they are pointed at something true. A trial close aimed at someone your product genuinely helps is a service. The same trial close aimed at someone it will not help is a con, and buyers feel the difference even when they cannot name it.
The standard I teach is the name of the course. Treat the prospective client the way you would treat yourself or your own family. If your mother were sitting in that chair, would you recommend this configuration, at this price, on this timeline? If yes, you owe it to them to be persuasive — because someone who needed help and did not get it because you were timid is not an ethical outcome either. Under-selling something that would genuinely have helped is its own kind of failure.
If it is right for them, closing hard is a service. If it is not, closing at all is a con. Everything else is technique.Zach Wennstedt · Do The Right Thing Sales Perfect
The Four Sales Training Programs
Scoped by team size and by what is actually broken. These are starting points, not a locked menu — nearly every engagement gets reshaped after I have listened to a few of your calls. Every program includes the Do The Right Thing Sales Perfect Training Course for every seat.
The Foundation
For owner-operators and micro teams. You are the sales department, you have never been formally trained, and nobody trains the owner.
The most common situation I see in small business: someone excellent at their craft who learned to sell by accident and has been improvising for years. There is usually nothing wrong with the instinct — the gap is that none of it is written down, so it cannot be improved, delegated, or repeated on a bad day.
- Do The Right Thing Sales Perfect Training Course, full access
- Recorded call review with a written scorecard
- Custom objection library built from your real conversations
- Written discovery question set for your product and buyer
- Two live coaching sessions with Zach
- Eight weeks of spaced reinforcement, not a single session
What changes first: discovery call length and next-step booking rate, usually inside two weeks.
Get pricing for The Foundation →The Systematic Selling Build
For small teams where results depend entirely on who happens to answer the phone.
This is the program that addresses the concentration risk in the research above. The goal is to get the process out of your top performer's head and into a document your third-best rep can execute — which is also the thing that raises what your company is worth, because it converts founder-dependent revenue into a transferable asset.
- Everything in The Foundation, for every seat
- Full seven-phase selling process documented with stage gates and exit criteria
- Systematic sales presentation development — one presentation the whole team delivers identically
- Psychological technique training: tie-downs, trial closes, price conditioning, question-sequence selling
- Onboarding curriculum so new hires ramp in weeks rather than quarters
- Two days on-site with Zach, plus twelve weeks of reinforcement
What changes first: pipeline honesty. Deals stop being called stage four because a rep feels good about them.
Get pricing for the Build →The Field Program
For larger teams and anyone selling in person, in homes, or across territories. This is the one with ride-alongs.
What a rep describes doing and what a rep actually does are frequently different things — not from dishonesty, but because most of selling is unconscious once it becomes habit. Recordings catch a lot. Sitting in the truck catches the rest: the pre-call state, the walk-up, the read of the room, the moment the spouse's body language changed and the rep did not notice.
- Everything in The Systematic Selling Build
- In-person ride-alongs with Zach — real appointments, real prospects, coaching between calls
- Individual scorecards and a written development plan per rep
- Sales manager coaching — training your managers to coach behavior, not chase numbers
- Multi-location rollout with consistency auditing
- Quarterly on-site refresher and drill sessions
What changes first: the gap between your best and worst performer, which is where the 10x research says the money is.
Get pricing for the Field Program →The Coaching Retainer
Ongoing reinforcement. The green line on the chart above.
If you only take one thing from this page: the difference between training that works and training that does not is almost entirely what happens in the eight weeks after the event. A workshop with no reinforcement produces a binder. Short, frequent, spaced drilling produces a different salesperson. This program exists because I would rather do the boring version that works than the exciting version that does not.
- Monthly recorded call review with written feedback per rep
- Live role play on the objections that actually came up that month
- Pipeline coaching by stage, not by gut feeling
- Script and objection library updates as new patterns emerge
- Direct line to Zach for live deals that need a second set of eyes
- New-hire onboarding for every rep you add, at no extra scope
What changes first: nothing dramatic in month one. Everything by month four. That is how skill acquisition works.
Get pricing for the Retainer →A straight answer about pricing
There are no prices printed on this page and I want to explain why rather than let you assume it is a sales tactic. A sales training program is scoped labor, and the honest number depends on things I cannot know from a web page: how many sellers, how many locations, whether the sale is one call or eight, how many recordings exist to work from, how much travel is involved, and whether you need one presentation built or four. Quoting a number before knowing those would mean either padding it to cover the worst case or quoting low and issuing change orders later. I do not do either.
What I will commit to: a scoped, fixed number in writing before any work starts, no change orders for anything inside that scope, and an honest answer if I think the free tools on this site will get you most of the way there without hiring me. Call 1-800-481-8638 and you will get a real number in one conversation.
Do The Right Thing Sales Perfect
The ethical spine and the psychological technique in one course. Five buyer self-interests, self-selling questions, tie-downs, trial closes, price conditioning. Included with every program on this page.
The Sales Training Techniques We Actually Drill
Not a curriculum outline. These are the specific behaviors that get practiced until they hold under pressure, and the reason each one is on the list.
1. The two-second pause
The highest-leverage two seconds in selling, and the hardest to teach because silence is physically uncomfortable. When a buyer raises an objection, an instant response signals that you have heard this a thousand times and are not actually listening to them. The pause signals that you took it seriously. Reps resist this for about a week and then never go back.
2. Discovery depth
Most discovery calls are nine minutes long and should be twenty-five. We drill four maps — current state, desired state, cost of the gap, and decision process — and the rule that you may not present until all four are filled in. This single constraint changes more outcomes than any closing technique, because the great majority of losses trace back to presenting before discovering rather than to a weak close at the end.
3. Layering
Asking a follow-up to the answer instead of moving to the next question on your list. The second and third question about the same topic are where the real information lives. Most reps ask one and move on, which is why their notes are full of surface facts and empty of anything usable.
4. Implication and payoff questions
The question sequence that lets the buyer articulate what the problem costs and what solving it would be worth. This is the mechanism that does the persuading, and it works because nobody argues with themselves. A number the buyer says out loud is load-bearing; the same number in your slide deck is a claim.
5. Trial closes
Low-stakes readiness checks that prevent you from asking for the decision into an unresolved objection, and prevent you from missing a buyer who was ready three minutes ago. Drilled with the line clearly marked: a trial close is a question, not a corner.
6. Tie-downs
Short confirming questions that verify you are still together. Used honestly this is just checking. Used dishonestly it stacks trivial agreements to make refusal socially awkward. I teach both the mechanic and the standard, because a technique this effective handed over without a rule for when to stop is how salespeople do damage they never intended.
7. Price conditioning
Establishing the frame before the number lands, so the price is heard against context rather than against nothing. Ranges with the variables attached, total cost of ownership, cost of inaction, and the shopping tax. Honest when the frame is true; manipulative when the frame is invented. We drill the true ones.
8. Objection isolation
“If we solved that, is there anything else keeping you from moving forward?” This one question converts an infinite queue of objections into a finite list, and it is the difference between a conversation and a war of attrition. Every rep learns it in ten minutes and forgets it within a week without drilling. Hence the reinforcement.
9. The forward-moving close
Ending on a small, specific, low-friction next question rather than re-asking for the whole decision. “Does it make sense to get the measurement on the calendar so you have real numbers?” is easy to say yes to. “So do you want to move forward?” restarts the entire deliberation from the beginning.
10. Permission to close the file
The follow-up message with the highest reply rate in selling, because it removes the buyer's obligation to be polite. Reps hate sending it and then send nothing else once they have seen what it does.
Every one of these appears with worked examples in the free sales objection handling library, and every term is defined in the sales glossary. You can absolutely learn them from those pages without hiring anyone. What a program adds is the drilling, the version written in your product's vocabulary, and someone listening to your actual calls telling you which one you are getting wrong.
Understanding The Psychology Of The Sale
Every technique above is downstream of one idea: buying is conditioning. Understanding the mechanism is what lets a rep improvise correctly instead of reciting.
A purchase decision is not an act of reasoning that occasionally gets emotional. It is an associative process that gets narrated afterward as reasoning. Associations built up across a lifetime fire in a particular sequence, a preference forms, and the conscious mind supplies justifications for a conclusion it did not actually compute. This is not a flaw in buyers. It is how human decision-making works in every domain, and it is why a purely logical presentation to an unmoved buyer produces polite agreement and no order.
The practical consequence is that you cannot install a decision by asserting facts. Claims arrive from an outside source with an obvious interest, and get filed accordingly. What you can do is prompt the buyer to build the association themselves, which is why the entire technique list above is questions rather than statements.
Mental rehearsal is the mechanism
When a buyer imagines a future state in specific detail, that rehearsal strengthens the connection between your product and the outcome they want. This is the reason a question outperforms a claim so reliably. You can tell someone a new mattress will help their back — a claim, from you, filed under things a salesperson said. Or you can ask what they think their back will feel like after a month of proper support. Now they are constructing the picture in their own head, using their own history of waking up stiff, and the argument they build is more durable than anything you could have written because it is made of their actual life.
Same move across every vertical. “What would it mean to know your kids are playing in a neighborhood you do not have to think about?” “If you were not spending six hours a week on this, what would you be doing instead?” “How would your month change if that bill just went away?” Each hands the persuasion job to the only person in the room whose opinion the buyer completely trusts.
The five self-interests, and why they are universal
Buyers look infinitely varied on the surface and run the same five programs underneath. Health. Family. Finances. Safety. Ease. Nearly every purchase decision a human makes traces to at least one, and the ones that trace to two or three at once close almost without resistance, because the buyer arrives at the conclusion from multiple directions simultaneously.
Health
The most powerful of the five, and where guidance matters most, because people are frequently wrong about what will help them and are aware that they are.
Family
Protecting the people they are responsible for. Overrides budget more often than any other motivator, which is exactly why it demands the most integrity from the seller.
Finances
Not greed — security. Most buyers are not trying to get rich. They are trying to stop worrying about a specific number.
Safety
Removing a threat, real or anticipated. Unusually resistant to price objections, because the alternative is a consequence they have already pictured.
Ease
Less friction, less time, fewer things to hold in your head. The quietest of the five and the one most often left on the table because nobody asked.
Why the ethics come first
These techniques work on people deciding about their family's safety and their own health. That is serious business, and it is why the rule about when to stop persuading is the first thing taught, not the last.
Loss aversion, and one sentence that proves it
People weigh potential losses more heavily than equivalent gains. The practical version: “this is costing you thirty-one thousand a year” consistently outperforms “this could save you thirty-one thousand a year,” despite being the identical fact stated two ways. Not a trick — both are true. But one of them lands on the machinery that actually produces decisions and the other does not.
Reactance, and why pressure backfires
When a person's freedom of choice feels threatened, the instinct is to resist regardless of the merits. This is why high-pressure closing produces the opposite of its intent with modern buyers, and why explicitly removing pressure — “I am not asking you to decide today” — frequently generates more forward motion than applying it. It also explains the permission-to-close-the-file message: giving someone an easy exit removes the reactance and you get an honest answer.
All of this is expanded in the psychology and persuasion section of the sales glossary, which defines twenty-two terms from this territory in plain English.
Which Program Fits You?
Five questions about your team and what is breaking. You will get a straight recommendation, including “you probably do not need to hire anyone” if that is the honest answer.
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How To Tell If Your Sales Team Sucks
A graded report card across the six things that actually separate a sales team that closes from one that quotes. Answer honestly — nobody is watching, nothing is stored, and a flattering score helps you exactly zero. You get a letter grade, a per-subject breakdown, and a printable card you can hand to your sales manager.
Fair warning: there is a hard rule in the grading. Fail Value Building, Differentiation, or Price Conditioning and you cannot pass, no matter how well you do on everything else. Those three are load-bearing.
Sales Team Evaluation
24 questions · six subjects · roughly two minutes
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Email me this report card
Your grade, all six subject scores, and the recommendations. A copy goes to you and a copy comes to Zach — that second copy is how you get a call about the subjects you failed. If you would rather keep it private, use the Print button instead; that sends nothing anywhere.
Why these six subjects and not others
Every question on the card maps to a behavior I can observe on a recorded call and coach in a week. That was the filter. There is nothing on here about attitude, hunger, grit, or being a “people person,” because none of those are teachable in a timeframe you would pay for, and most of them are just descriptions of a rep who already has a system.
Value Building, Differentiation, and Price Conditioning are the three that can fail you outright. Here is the reasoning. A team that cannot build value competes on price by default, which means your margin is set by your least disciplined competitor. A team that cannot differentiate without bashing either loses the comparison or wins it by making the buyer uncomfortable, and buyers remember discomfort. And a team with no price conditioning drops a number into a vacuum and then negotiates against the silence. Any one of those three, left broken, will quietly cap everything else you do — which is why a team can score well on discovery and closing technique and still be a C.
The other three subjects matter enormously and they are recoverable in a different order. Discovery is the highest-leverage fix but takes longest to feel natural. Closing technique — trial closes, tie-downs, the A/B option close — is the fastest thing on the list to improve, usually inside two weeks of drilling. And Do The Right Thing is the subject that determines whether the other five make you money for a decade or make you money for eighteen months and then a reputation problem.
If you want the questions behind the questions, the objection handling library has the scripts and the sales glossary defines every technique named on the card. If you failed a load-bearing subject, that is what the training programs above are for — and 1-800-481-8638 gets you a straight answer in one conversation.
Failed Differentiation or Value Building?
Those two are the most common failures on the report card and they share a root cause: the team never learned to move a buyer off price. Start free with 201 scripted objections and the value-over-price reframes, then drill them on the wheel.
Sales Training By Industry
The principles transfer. The scripts never do. Here is how the work actually changes by the kind of sale you run.
Home services & contractor sales training
In-home, high-emotion, one-visit decisions with a spouse present and three competing bids on the kitchen table. The work is framing decision criteria before the quote, surviving the “we are getting other estimates” moment, and never leaving without a defined next step. This is also where ride-alongs pay for themselves fastest.
B2B services & agency sales training
Multi-stakeholder, long cycles, and a champion who has to sell you internally without you in the room. The work is discovery depth, ROI framing your champion can carry into a meeting alone, and killing no-decision losses — which in this category usually outnumber competitive losses.
Medical & aesthetic practice sales training
Consultations run by people who did not sign up to be in sales and feel uncomfortable doing it. The work is a consultation framework that feels clinical rather than commercial, and financing conversations that do not embarrass anyone on either side of the desk.
Manufacturing & distribution sales training
Technical buyers, procurement gates, entrenched incumbent suppliers, and a purchasing department trained to commoditize you. The work is displacement selling, total-cost-of-ownership arguments, and getting the specification influenced before the RFP exists rather than responding to someone else's.
Professional practice sales training
Attorneys, accountants, advisors, consultants. Expertise is abundant and the actual sale is trust. The work is a structured intake conversation, transparent pricing language that does not sound apologetic, and follow-up that does not feel like pestering.
Retail & high-ticket showroom sales training
Walk-ins, browsers, and “just looking.” The work is a greeting that does not trigger defensiveness, qualification inside ninety seconds, and a handoff process that stops leads dying in the gap between shifts.
What Actually Happens When You Hire Me
A real conversation, not a discovery call
Twenty to thirty minutes on the phone. I ask what is broken, you tell me, and I tell you whether I think I can fix it. If the answer is that the free tools on this site will get you eighty percent of the way there, I will say so and we will both have saved an afternoon. That happens more often than you would expect from someone whose income depends on it not happening.
I listen to your calls
Before any proposal exists. Recordings if you have them, live listening if you do not, ride-alongs if you sell in person. Nothing gets designed from a questionnaire, because what a team describes doing and what a team does are different documents.
A scoped, fixed number in writing
What is included, what is not, what it costs, what the timeline is, and what you keep at the end. No change orders for anything inside that scope. You own every document, script, and recording we produce — that is deliberate, so that leaving is clean if it ever makes sense.
Build, then drill
The build phase produces the artifacts: process, gates, scripts, objection library, presentation, scorecards. The drill phase makes them automatic. The second phase is longer than the first and it is the one people try to cut. It is also the one that determines whether you end up on the red line or the green line.
Measurement against a baseline
We record where you are before anything starts — close rate, next-step booking rate, discovery length, average discount, time in stage. Without a baseline, “did it work” becomes a matter of opinion, and opinions favor whoever is more confident rather than whoever is right.
What I will not do
I will not run a ballroom event and disappear. I will not teach manufactured urgency or pressure tactics. I will not promise a number I cannot control, and I will be cautious about anyone who does. And I will not take an engagement where I think the honest answer is that your problem is upstream in marketing or downstream in delivery — I will tell you that instead.
When You Should Expect To See Something
Anyone who promises a fast revenue number is selling you a feeling. Here is the honest sequence, and why it goes in this order.
| Timeframe | What moves | Why then |
|---|---|---|
| Week 1–2 | Next-step booking rate. Discovery call length. Talk-to-listen ratio. | Simple, observable behaviors that require permission rather than skill. A rep can start booking next steps on the first call after being told to. |
| Week 3–6 | Objection responses stop being improvised. Discounting drops. | This is where drilling starts producing recall under pressure. Reading a script produces recognition; saying it fifty times produces recall. |
| Week 6–10 | Pipeline gets smaller and more honest. Forecast accuracy improves. | Stage gates start being enforced, so deals that were never real get closed-lost. Expect the pipeline to look worse before the forecast gets better. |
| One full sales cycle | Close rate. | Deals already in flight were sold the old way. If your cycle is 45 days, the number moves in month two or three. If it is six months, it moves in month seven. |
| Month 3–6 | Average deal size. Ramp time for new hires. | Published research associates formal training with 20–30% larger deals among top performers, but deal size shifts only once value framing replaces price framing across a full cycle. |
| Month 6+ | Rep retention. | RAIN Group found companies with highly effective sales training report notably lower turnover — 33.8% against 45.5%. Reps leave when they are failing and nobody can tell them why. |
Note the sequence carefully, because it is the opposite of how most people evaluate training. The things that move first are not revenue. If you judge the program at week three by looking at the revenue line, you will conclude it failed while it is working exactly as designed. Judge it at week three by whether every call is ending with a booked next step.
Sales Training vs. Sales Coaching vs. Sales Enablement
These three get used interchangeably and they are not the same purchase. Buying the wrong one is a common and expensive mistake, so here is the distinction in plain terms.
Sales training transfers capability that did not exist before. It is finite, has a curriculum, and answers the question “does this person know how to do the thing?” A rep who has never been taught to isolate an objection needs training, and no amount of encouragement will substitute for it.
Sales coaching develops capability that partially exists, through observation and feedback on specific behaviors. It is ongoing rather than finite and answers a different question: “is this person doing the thing, correctly, under pressure, on Tuesday?” A rep who knows perfectly well how to isolate an objection and does not do it when a buyer gets tense needs coaching, and repeating the training will not help.
Sales enablement is infrastructure — content, tools, collateral, CRM configuration, and the systems that make selling easier. It answers “does this person have what they need?” Enablement is genuinely valuable and it is also where the largest amount of money gets wasted, because buying a platform feels like solving a problem and produces a dashboard rather than a behavior change.
| Sales training | Sales coaching | Sales enablement | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Answers | Do they know how? | Are they doing it? | Do they have what they need? |
| Shape | Finite, curriculum-based | Ongoing, observation-based | Infrastructure and content |
| Fails when | There is no reinforcement afterward | The manager was never taught to coach | It substitutes for either of the other two |
| You need it if | The skill genuinely is not there | The skill is there and inconsistent | Reps waste hours on things a system should do |
| In these programs | The Foundation and the Build | The Field Program and the Retainer | Not what I sell — I will tell you if that is your problem |
The most common misdiagnosis I encounter: a company whose reps genuinely know what to do, buying more training, when what they actually needed was a manager who could sit with them and say “play me the last two minutes of that call.” The second most common: a company buying software to fix a problem that was a missing conversation.
Why most sales managers cannot coach
Not a criticism of your managers. Almost every sales manager was promoted for being good at selling, which is roughly like promoting the fastest runner to coach the track team. Selling and developing sellers are different skills, and virtually nobody is taught the second one. So a well-meaning manager defaults to the tools they have — asking about the number, applying pressure, and offering to take over the hard deals — all of which produce a status update and mild anxiety rather than improvement.
The shift is small in description and large in practice. A manager asks “where are we on the Henderson deal?” A coach asks “play me the last two minutes of that call.” The first question generates information the manager already suspected. The second one generates a specific, observable, fixable behavior. Manager coaching is a component of The Field Program for exactly this reason: training the team without training the person who reinforces it means you have bought a decay curve.
How to measure whether any of it worked
Set the baseline before you start. Then judge on the schedule in the table above rather than on the schedule your impatience prefers. Concretely, the five numbers worth recording on day zero:
- Next-step booking rate — the percentage of calls ending with a calendared action. Moves in week one and predicts everything downstream.
- Average discovery call length — a proxy for whether discovery is happening at all. Nine minutes is presenting; twenty-five is discovering.
- Stage-to-stage conversion — not overall close rate. You need to know which gate is leaking, not that the roof is wet.
- Average discount given — direct measure of whether the team is selling value or buying deals. Often the single largest recoverable number.
- Win rate versus no-decision rate — separates losses to competitors from losses to inertia. They need opposite fixes, and most companies do not distinguish them.
If a training provider does not ask you for these before quoting, they are selling an event rather than an outcome. It is a reasonable question to ask any of us, including me.
In-house versus outside sales training
Building it internally is a legitimate option and sometimes the right one. It makes sense when you have someone with both the selling expertise and the instructional skill, and — this is the part that kills most internal efforts — the protected time to actually do it. The failure pattern is predictable: a strong sales leader is assigned the project, gets sixty percent of the way through documenting the process, and then a quarter-end arrives and the document sits untouched for a year.
Outside help makes sense when you want it finished on a date, when you want an outsider's read on calls that everyone internally has become numb to, or when the person who would build it internally is also your top producer — in which case building it costs you their selling time, which is usually the most expensive labor in the building.
The honest version: if you have the person and the protected time, build it internally and use the free objection handling library and sales glossary on this site as your starting skeleton. I would rather tell you that than take an engagement you did not need.
Questions About The Programs
It depends on team size, number of locations, sales cycle complexity, how much travel is involved, and how many presentations need building — which is why there is no number printed on this page. What I commit to is a scoped, fixed price in writing before any work starts, with no change orders for anything inside that scope. Call 1-800-481-8638 and you will have a real number after one conversation.
Yes. Ride-alongs are core to The Field Program and available as an add-on to the Systematic Selling Build. I go out on real appointments with your reps, watch actual conversations with actual prospects, and coach between calls. It catches what recordings cannot: the pre-call state, the walk-up, the read of the room. Travel is quoted separately and transparently as part of the scope, never marked up.
Typically one to fifty sellers, including owner-operators who are the entire sales department. Below that, the work is usually about building your own process rather than training a team. Above fifty it becomes a sales enablement program, which is a different engagement with different economics, and I will tell you honestly if that is what you actually need.
Both. Call review, script development, process design, and coaching retainers work extremely well remotely. Objection intensives and initial process builds are usually better in the room, because role play with cameras off is a pale imitation of role play with people who can see each other flinch. Ride-alongs are on-site by definition.
Fair question and the research backs the premise — ES Research puts the failure rate at 85 to 90 percent. The failures share a pattern: single events, generic content, and no reinforcement. So every program here is built from your actual call recordings rather than a template, includes eight to twelve weeks of spaced drilling rather than ending on the last day, and is measured against a baseline recorded before we start. That is not a guarantee. It is a design that addresses the specific documented reasons the other programs fail.
I guarantee delivery of the scoped work and I do not guarantee a revenue number, because revenue depends on your market, your lead quality, your pricing, your product, and whether your team does the drilling. Anyone guaranteeing a percentage increase is either padding the price to cover the payout or relying on you not invoking it. What I will do is agree with you in advance on what success looks like, and set a checkpoint where we both assess it honestly.
Resistance is almost always a signal that previous training was condescending, generic, or an implied criticism. I start by listening to their calls and asking what they think is broken. Reps are usually right about what is wrong and almost never asked. When the program is visibly built from their input, resistance drops fast. The few who stay resistant are usually telling you something useful about a different problem.
Yes, along with the line that separates them from manipulation. These are neutral tools — a trial close is a question, a tie-down is checking you are still together. Aimed at a buyer your product genuinely helps, they are a service. Aimed at someone it will not help, the identical techniques become a con. The Do The Right Thing Sales Perfect course teaches both the mechanics and the standard for when to stop.
For a lot of people, yes, and I would rather say that than pretend otherwise. The 201-objection library, the 198-term glossary, the objection wheel, and the five-step method are free, permanent, and require no signup. If you are a solo operator with the discipline to drill them daily, you will get most of the benefit. What a paid program adds is the version written in your product's vocabulary, somebody listening to your actual calls, and the reinforcement structure that makes it stick when discipline runs out.
Call 1-800-481-8638 or send the form below. First conversation is twenty to thirty minutes, costs nothing, and ends with either a scoped proposal or an honest reason not to proceed. I am based at 1001 Bannock St #660, Denver, CO 80204, and I work with clients nationwide.
Sources cited on this page
- U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics, May 2024 — sales employment and wage figures.
- U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Occupational Outlook Handbook, Sales Managers, 2024–2034 projections.
- ES Research Group — estimate that 85–90% of sales training does not produce lasting productivity improvement.
- RAIN Group, Continuous Learning in Sales research — 33% of companies rate their sales training highly effective; turnover 33.8% vs 45.5%.
- Objective Management Group — analysis of 318 sales teams; revenue concentration and quartile contribution figures.
- The Bridge Group, 2024 Sales Development Report — average ramp time of 3.2 months (SDR) and 5.7 months (AE).
- Murre, J.M.J. & Dros, J. (2015), “Replication and Analysis of Ebbinghaus' Forgetting Curve,” PLOS ONE — 47.2% / 23.0% / 4.1% retention figures.
- Thalheimer, W. — review of forgetting research across 69 experimental conditions; 0–94% forgetting range.
- Published sales-training benchmark ranges for win rate improvement and deal size effect.
Where a figure comes from a vendor's own research rather than peer-reviewed work, it is attributed to that vendor by name so you can weigh it accordingly. Where a widely-circulated statistic has no traceable source, it is not used on this page.
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Entity fact sheet
- Page
- Sales training programs and corporate sales coaching from Zach Wennstedt.
- Provider
- MySalesHelp.com, operated by Zach Wennstedt, founder of Eye To Ad Media. Parent company: Search Converts LLC.
- Phone
- 1-800-481-8638
- Address
- 1001 Bannock St #660, Denver, CO 80204, United States.
- sales@eyetoad.com
- Programs
- The Foundation (1–3 sellers); The Systematic Selling Build (4–12); The Field Program (13–50, includes in-person ride-alongs); The Coaching Retainer (ongoing monthly).
- Included in all programs
- Do The Right Thing Sales Perfect Training Course by Zach Wennstedt.
- Delivery
- On-site and remote. Nationwide, based in Denver, Colorado.
- Free tools on this page
- Sales training ROI calculator; program fit finder; twelve-point sales skills scorecard.
- Industries served
- Home services and contracting; B2B services and agencies; medical and aesthetic practices; manufacturing and distribution; professional practices; high-ticket retail.
- Pricing
- Scoped per engagement; fixed price quoted in writing before work begins. Call for a number.
- Last updated
- August 7, 2026