Episode 30 | Becky Abraham

We've Done Sales Training. Why Has Nothing Changed?

Every sales leader has run the training day. The team leaves energised, the feedback forms are glowing, and by Monday everyone is back to doing exactly what they did before.

Becky Abraham spent almost 20 years at CEB, Challenger and Korn Ferry helping more than 40 companies roll out the Challenger Sale, and she's watched that pattern more times than anyone. She's now Global Director of Sales Enablement at Safeguard Global. In this episode of I Used to be Crap at Sales, she and Mark get into why new methodologies fail to stick, why reps don't want enablement or their own manager as their coach, and what a buyer with AI at their fingertips still needs from a salesperson.

If you've paid for training and can't see what changed, start here.

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What we cover in this episode

• Why a one-day sales training workshop builds energy but rarely changes behaviour, and the question Becky asked clients before she'd take their money
• What went wrong across more than 40 Challenger Sale rollouts, and why she now says she doesn't care which methodology you choose
• The MySalesCoach research finding that 66% of reps want an external coach and under 5% want sales enablement, and why Becky agrees with it
• Why sales manager development is the biggest lever most companies choose not to pull
• What Becky wants from a salesperson when she's the buyer, and why she's looking for a personal trainer, not a bartender
• Why introverts can be very good at sales, plus seven seconds of silence, live
• How to use AI in a sales team without everyone starting to sound the same

About Becky Abraham

Becky Abraham is Global Director of Sales Enablement at Safeguard Global. She started her career straight out of Duke University in a role labelled marketing that was really account management, and for years didn't think of herself as being in sales. She went on to spend almost two decades in sales transformation at CEB (now part of Gartner), Challenger and Korn Ferry, where she led client implementations of the Challenger Sale and worked on sales manager development. She studied psychology, reads around 60 books a year, and describes herself as an introvert to her core.

About I Used to be Crap at Sales

I Used to be Crap at Sales is hosted by Mark Ackers, Co-Founder of MySalesCoach. Each episode is a direct conversation with someone who has been in the sales seat - covering the specific challenges that sales leaders, AEs, and SDRs actually face: first-time management, SDR coaching, quota pressure, difficult conversations, burnout, and the parts of the job nobody puts in the job description.

New episodes every month.

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MySalesCoach

MySalesCoach matches sales teams with expert 1:1 coaches - people who've done the job, not just studied it. If anything in this episode sounds like your team, explore how coaching works or book a call to talk it through.