Samantha Caine
Over the years I’ve lost count of the excellent training days I’ve seen come and go. People leave the room genuinely energised, full of good intentions, and then Monday arrives, the pipeline is still there, the inbox is still full, and the new habits quietly slip.
It isn’t anyone’s fault. It’s how memory works. The “forgetting curve”, first documented by Hermann Ebbinghaus and replicated many times since, suggests we lose around half of new information within a day, and up to 90% within a month, unless it’s deliberately reinforced. A single training day, however good, is fighting that curve. What makes learning stick isn’t intensity; it’s spacing, repetition and use over time.
There’s another thing I’ve come to believe, having watched a lot of sales teams. Most experienced salespeople don’t actually have a content problem and they don’t lack knowledge about sales techniques! They’ve sat through the models and read the books; they know, more or less, what good looks like. What they’re short of is the time, the reinforcement and the support to turn what they know into what they consistently do. The gap is rarely knowledge; it’s the practice, coaching and honest feedback that closes the distance between knowing and doing.
That’s borne out by the way capability is really built. The well-known 70:20:10 principle holds that we learn most on the job and from other people, and comparatively little from formal teaching alone. Coaching, repetition and a network of peers matter more than another slide deck.
And all of this has to be squared with a simple commercial reality: sales departments don’t have endless budgets for training. Development can’t mean pulling people off the road for one expensive course after another; the cost, in both money and lost selling time, soon stops adding up.
So the real question wasn’t only how to make learning stick. It was how to make it stick affordably, and keep it going across a whole year without stretching the training budget.
So instead of a two-day course, we designed a year.
The shape matters more than it might sound. Six live masterclasses are spaced across twelve months, so there’s always time to take an idea back to a real deal, try it, and come back to talk about what happened. In between, members have practical tools, a peer group facing the same challenges, optional one-to-one coaching, and an Academy Tutor to keep momentum going. Learning compounds when it’s given room to breathe.
There’s a point here for the businesses we work with, too. Many of the teams we support have already invested in a big, formal sales training rollout, and quite right. The Academy isn’t there to replace that. It’s designed to build on it: a cost-effective way to keep that investment alive, reinforce it, and turn it into lasting habit long after the launch fanfare has faded. Think of it as the reinforcement layer most training programmes are missing.
What that means in practice:
For the individual
- Skills that actually stick: practised and reinforced across a year, not forgotten within a month.
- Coaching and a peer group to work through your real, live deals, not hypothetical ones.
- A full year of structured CPD to your name.
- Less time sitting in classrooms, more improvement where it counts, in front of customers.
For the business
- More return from the sales training you’ve already paid for.
- Sharper habits exactly where margin is won or lost: pricing, qualifying, and keeping deals moving.
- A way to keep developing the team without pulling them off the road for days at a time.
- A structured, measurable programme that L&D can stand behind, at a sensible price.
This month, our first cohort of 19 begins, with every place taken. They’ve come from across the sectors we work in, and I’ll be watching their year closely, because the honest truth is that a first cohort teaches you as much as you teach it.
If any of this resonates, if you’ve ever felt the gap between a good training day and lasting change, I’d be glad to talk. Our next cohort opens in 2027.