Your Sales Training is Probably a Waste of Money. (Unless You Read This First).

Companies in Singapore and across the globe will spend billions of dollars on sales training this year. They’ll hire experts, run workshops, and teach their teams the latest negotiation tactics. And for many of them, it will be a complete waste of money.

Here's why.

Your Sales Training is Probably a Waste of Money. (Unless You Read This First).

They are spending a fortune training a world-class racing driver, but they are putting that driver into a car with a sputtering engine and poorly aligned wheels. The driver is your salesperson, armed with skills from Sales Enablement. The car is your sales process, built (or neglected) by Sales Operations.

And a great driver in a bad car always loses the race.

Before you spend another dollar on training, you need to understand this critical partnership. Sales Enablement focuses on the person—the coaching, the content, the skills. Sales Operations focuses on the process—the CRM, the workflow, the data, the rules of engagement. They are two different jobs, and I believe that one must come before the other.

This is the core philosophy we teach in our Sales Operations Excellence (SOE) course. It’s about building the car before you enter the race.

The Two-Way Radio: How The Best Teams Communicate

In a winning racing team, the driver and the pit crew are in constant communication. It's the same in a winning sales team. The two functions—Enablement and Operations—must be talking to each other.

Think about it this way: Sales Ops, the pit crew, analyses the data from the car's sensors (your CRM). They might discover that the car is losing speed on a specific corner of the track—for example, that your sales team is consistently losing deals at the proposal stage. They don't just keep this information to themselves. They get on the radio to the driver's coach (Sales Enablement) and say, "We have a problem on Turn 3."

The coach then takes that specific, data-backed insight and works with the driver. Instead of generic "driving lessons," they practice that specific corner over and over. They create a targeted training module on building better proposals. The data from Operations makes the training from Enablement brutally effective.

It works the other way, too. The pit crew (Ops) might design a brilliant new, faster way to change tyres (a new lead qualification process). But the driver (the sales rep) needs to be trained on how to execute that new manoeuvre perfectly. That's Enablement's job—to ensure the brilliant work of the Ops team is actually adopted and used correctly.

The Mechanic's Golden Rule: Check the Engine Before You Race

Here's the mistake I see companies make over and over again. They hire a superstar salesperson or invest in expensive training, expecting to see results, but they've never bothered to look under the bonnet of their own sales process.

You can have the most skilled salesperson in the world, but if they have to spend two hours a day on manual data entry or wait a week for a simple quote approval, you are wasting their talent. Their time is being eaten by friction.

So, before you invest in the next big sales training programme, do a simple process audit. Ask every person on your sales team this question: "What are the three biggest things that slow you down or frustrate you each week?"

Their answers will be your operational to-do list. You'll hear things like, "It takes forever to get a custom contract approved," or "I can never find the right case study for this specific type of client." These are operational failures. Fixing them first gives your team a clear, smooth runway. Once the car is fixed, then you can invest in driver training and watch them fly.

Become the Architect of a Winning System

The best sales leaders know they are not just managing people; they are engineering a system for success. They focus on building a reliable, efficient "car" so that their talented "drivers" can perform at their best. This is the art and science of Sales Operations.

It's a learnable skill that can change how your entire company performs.

The Sales Operations Excellence (SOE) course from ClickAcademy Asia provides a practical, hands-on framework to give you the analytical and execution skills needed to build this system.

If you’re ready to stop wasting money on training that doesn't stick and start building a process that creates winners, this is your next step. Sign up for the Sales Operations Excellence (SOE) course today and learn how to build the high-performance car your team deserves.

Build the System Before You Train the Team

Sales training without operational excellence is like racing with a broken engine. The Sales Operations Excellence (SOE) course from ClickAcademy Asia helps you fix the friction, align your systems, and create a smooth runway for your team’s success. Learn how to engineer the process before you invest in the people. Sign up today and build the high-performance sales machine your team deserves.