Let’s be honest. If most B2B salespeople were athletes, they wouldn’t be out there winning games. They’d be sitting on the bench with an ice pack, wondering what just hit them.
Why? Because they’re being sent into high-stakes, high-pressure scenarios with zero real practice.
In professional sports, athletes train 90% of the time and compete 10%. That’s the standard. Practice is sacred. Film is studied. Coaching is constant. You rehearse before you perform.
But in sales? It’s reversed. Most sellers are expected to perform 100% of the time, with barely any structured training or coaching after onboarding. They get a CRM login, a comp plan, and a quota. That’s it.
Then we wonder why performance plateaus. Why win rates sag. Why deals stall.
It’s not a mystery.
- Sales reps forget the fundamentals under pressure.
- Sales managers turn into triage nurses, not coaches.
- And the team becomes reactive instead of ready.
We’d never accept this in sports. Yet in business development, it’s the norm.
Sales Is a Performance, Not a Product Pitch
Selling isn’t about presenting better slides. It’s about navigating real conversations with real humans under stress. It’s about uncovering motivation, creating commitment, and moving complex deals forward when it’s far easier to stall out.
That takes skill. And skill gets rusty without reps.
You wouldn’t expect a quarterback to call the perfect audible without ever practicing it. Why would we expect a rep to handle objections they’ve never rehearsed out loud?
What High-Performance Sales Teams Do Differently
At Next Level, we work with leadership teams to build business development organizations that run like elite athletic programs:
Structured Practice: Weekly role plays and talk-track work. No improvising when the stakes are high.
Coaching Culture: Managers coach the process, not just the pipeline. They know what “good” looks like—and how to teach it.
Reinforcement: One-and-done training doesn’t stick. We build rhythms of repetition and real-world application.
Mental Game: We don’t just teach tactics. We rewire beliefs, eliminate head trash, and strengthen identity.
Great salespeople are corporate athletes. But too many are expected to self-train with no guidance and no feedback loop. Then they burn out or flame out—and we start over.
Want a Team That’s Ready to Win?
If you’re tired of watching your team wing it on game day, maybe it’s time to build a system where preparation is baked in.
Because pressure doesn’t build character, it reveals it. And in sales, the only thing that shows up under pressure is what’s been practiced.
Let’s build a sales culture that trains to win.
