How to turn knowledge into action
Salespeople often know what to do. They have been told, trained and reminded. And then, at a critical moment, they do something else. Stanford University professors Jeffrey Pfeffer and Robert Sutton coined this the “knowledge-doing gap” 25 years ago.
This is best illustrated by looking at how sales reps use data. A study of B2B sellers found that 83% of sellers who significantly exceeded their quota said they used financial data somewhere in their sales methods. Top performers reach that number. Most salespeople don’t do that, and it’s not because they lack data.
Data has never been more available. After a decade of investing in CRM platforms, dashboards, conversation intelligence, and analytics tools, the numbers sales reps need are usually visible on a screen. they saw it. They’ve been trained on it. Then they get on a live call and do the usual pitches about relationships, instincts, and the stories that worked last quarter.
This is not a technology adoption issue. This is a behavior default issue, and the two require completely different fixes.
Knowing data and using it are different skills
Salespeople want to sell smarter. But under the pressure of live conversation, the brain takes the path of least resistance. Along that path, there’s very little “pulling out the variance report and building a question around it.” It’s a familiar movement and one that feels like progress.
You can see this happening in real time. At one freight brokerage, agents had been in a structured sales program for three to six months and were familiar with the discovery process. They could recite it. And the moment a prospect expressed interest or asked about an interest rate, they would abandon the whole process and jump straight to a quote. The knowledge remained the same. Anyway, the behavior was broken.
That is the gap between knowledge and execution in miniature. Behaviors that are not practiced in real situations will not surface when the situation becomes reality.
Things get even worse when you have less sales time. Salesforce’s Sales Survey found that sales reps only spend 28% of their week actually selling, with the rest spent in administration, internal meetings, and data entry. [1]. If the window is very narrow, the person in charge protects the window by defaulting to what they feel is the fastest and feels slow in getting to the data until it becomes automatic.
Costs appear on the income statement rather than on the call sheet
Having one rep skip data on a single call seems harmless. When the same defaults are repeated across teams and quarters, the numbers that leaders are accountable to become problematic.
Prediction distortion
Wrong assumptions are never corrected Margin erosion
Salespeople don’t understand the value of problem-solving, so they lower their rates to win Intangible Strategic Signals
Changes in demand and procurement timing are not discovered Unexplained differences
I’ve always known about it, but it was dismissed as a “market”
Sales skills may not seem like an obvious culprit. However, these are defaults for the same behavior and are displayed in separate columns.
More training won’t solve the problem
When your reps aren’t using data, their instinct is to retrain them on data. Another walkthrough of the dashboard. Updated process documentation. Kickoff session on new analytical tools. Salespeople already know what’s going on, so their behavior is unlikely to change. Adding knowledge to the gap between what you know and what you do only widens areas that were never the problem.
What changes behavior is practice, not more information.
This is a lesson about the forgetting curve. Information conveyed in an event quickly disappears, but behaviors built through repeated practice stick and remain. Salespeople need to rehearse data-driven conversations about their live deals over and over until they reflexively hit on the data point before asking a question.
Build habits where work is done
Organizations that get this right have stopped treating data-driven selling as content to deliver and started treating it as action to build. This principle is not new. Most of what people learn on the job is done on the job, not in the classroom. Work is where practices come into play because work is where habits are formed. In practice, this means several things work together.
One action at a time
Rather than absorbing an entire methodology at once, salespeople work on a single practice (for example, anchoring discovery questions to data points) and move from basic to advanced as it becomes established. Practices associated with real accounts
Salespeople rehearse based on real deals and calls, not hypothetical role-play, so behavior is formed in the exact context in which it needs to ignite. AI coaching in the work flow
It’s trained on your organization’s unique data and language to help you prepare for the real conversation and subsequent debriefing. Manager as a verification gate
Before reps are promoted to a higher level, managers check to see if the new behaviors are actually showing up in the field.
That last part is more important than you might think. It’s the difference between “we trained them to do it” and “we verified that they’re doing it,” and only one will show up in the prediction. It also allows leaders to read exactly how many salespeople are truly adopting the behavior and how many are simply able to describe it.
What does this change for leaders?
Salespeople who hit their quota aren’t smart about data. They practiced it until it became reflexive. This is a capability that any sales organization can intentionally build, but most fail to do so. If you close the gap between knowledge and execution where it actually exists (in your daily work), the numbers will follow.
References:
[1] Salesforce’s Sales Survey found that sales reps only spend 28% of their time each week actually selling, with the rest spent in administration, internal meetings, and data entry.
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