There's a conversation I have at the end of almost every programme I run.
A participant pulls me aside, or sends a message a few days later, and says some version of the same thing: "I get it, Nick. I can see why this works. But when I go back and try to do it, my boss asks for more slides."
They're not wrong. And they're not making excuses. They've just bumped into something that training alone can't fix.
Across the commercial teams I work with, one of the most powerful shifts people make is learning to strip their communication back. Fewer slides. Cleaner messages. A story that earns the customer's attention rather than overwhelming it.
It's not a small change, for many people it feels almost counterintuitive at first. We've been conditioned to equate volume with rigour. More data means more credibility. A thick deck signals effort. Taking it away feels exposed.
But once people experience the difference, once they see a customer lean in rather than glaze over, the penny drops fast. They get it.
So why doesn't it stick?
The Culture Doesn't Change When the Training Ends
Here's what I've come to believe, after years of watching this play out: the biggest barrier to sustained behaviour change in commercial teams isn't skill. It's permission.
When a participant goes back to their desk and builds a sharper, cleaner presentation, and then their line manager says "can you add more detail?" or "shouldn't there be a slide on X?", a very clear message is sent. Not intentionally. But unmistakably.
We say we want this. But we actually reward the opposite.
And it takes a remarkably resilient person to keep going against that grain. Most people, quite rationally, adapt back.
The training didn't fail. The environment failed the training.
This is why I'm increasingly convinced that the most important person in any behaviour change programme isn't in the room.
It's the line manager. The senior leader. The person whose habits, preferences and off-hand comments set the cultural weather for everyone beneath them.
If leaders aren't modelling the behaviours themselves, if they're still presenting with 40 slides, still asking for more data, still rewarding complexity, then the training becomes a nice two days that gets quietly filed away.
But when leaders do model it? When they're visibly using the same frameworks, holding space for shorter stories, actively coaching rather than just sponsoring. The effect is transformational. I've seen teams where the shift is tangible months later, not because the training was different, but because the environment reinforced it.
A Question Worth Asking
If you're investing in developing your commercial teams, it's worth sitting with this:
What signals are your senior people sending, consciously or not, about how communication and selling should actually look?
Not what they say in the kick-off session. Not what's written in the learning objectives. But what they do in the meetings afterwards. What they reward. What they ask for.
That gap between the culture you're training towards and the culture your leaders are modelling is usually where the ROI disappears.
The good news is that it's entirely fixable. But it requires more than a training programme. It requires leaders to be willing to go first.
If this resonates with something you're seeing in your own organisation, get in touch.
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