Over the past five years, Hot Rivet has observed that among top performing organizations, over 50 percent have a strategy for developing the human capital asset in sales. In short, a commitment to a Sales Culture. In contrast, most average and low-performing organisations prefer to "follow, not lead" in training. Our opinion is that failure to invest in training compromises business productivity.

High-performers distinguish themselves in how quickly they can integrate strategic change with training. Low performing organizations spend most of their time using training to "fix" tactical issues.

In addition, average and low-performing training organizations can get caught in an "austerity trap"; as learning and development (L&D) groups focus on keeping training costs down, they’re inhibited from investment into new thinking and resort to "sheep-dipping" their sales force. Without a well-designed process to follow, this can all too often result in widespread confusion at the operational level of the company.