The Cost of Leaving Sales and Leadership Development to Chance
Why Companies That Rely on Experience Alone Often Underperform
In the MedTech, Biotech and CRO sectors, organisations invest significant resources in attracting talented people. They hire experienced sales professionals, promote high performers into leadership roles, and often expect knowledge, skills and best practices to spread naturally throughout the business.
Sometimes it works. More often, it doesn't.
Many organisations unintentionally leave sales and leadership development to chance, relying on individuals to learn through experience, observation and trial and error. While experience is undoubtedly valuable, it is rarely enough on its own to build a consistently high-performing commercial organisation.
I recently had the pleasure of working with a forward-thinking MedTech company that brought its commercial leaders together from across the globe to address this very challenge. The leadership team recognised that exceptional commercial performance does not happen by accident. Developing sales and leadership capability needed to become a core part of the company's business strategy rather than an occasional training event. The initiative marked the beginning of a long-term commitment to building the skills, behaviours and leadership capabilities required to drive future growth.
The Assumption That Experience Equals Capability
One of the most common assumptions in commercial organisations is that people will naturally develop the skills they need over time. After all, if someone has spent ten years in a sales role, surely they know how to qualify opportunities, manage stakeholders, forecast accurately and negotiate effectively. Likewise, if someone has been promoted into a leadership role, they should know how to coach, motivate and develop others. Unfortunately, experience does not always create expertise nor create new ways of thinking if those have never been explored. In reality, many professionals simply repeat the same habits year after year, regardless of whether those habits are effective.
Without structured development, individuals often become highly experienced at doing things the way they have always been done rather than learning better ways to achieve results.
Inconsistent Onboarding Creates Inconsistent Results
The impact often starts with onboarding. Many new hires receive extensive product training but limited support in developing the commercial or leadership skills required to succeed. As a result, onboarding can vary significantly depending on; the manager, the region they work in, colleagues they interact with and previous experience they bring with them. Some employees benefit from strong coaching and guidance, others are expected to "figure it out" as they go. This inconsistency creates uneven performance from the outset.
While one new hire may become productive within a few months, another may take significantly longer to reach the same level despite having similar potential. For organisations operating in competitive markets, these delays can be extremely costly.
Different Teams Often Develop Different Ways of Working
Without a structured development framework, commercial teams frequently evolve their own approaches and over time, organisations can find themselves with different sales processes across territories, different qualification standards, forecasting methodologies, different approaches to stakeholder management and different expectations of leadership.
The challenge is not necessarily that one approach is right and another is wrong, the challenge is inconsistency. When teams operate differently, leaders struggle to evaluate performance accurately, forecast results reliably and share best practices across the business. The organisation effectively becomes a collection of individual approaches rather than a unified commercial team. This often explains why some regions consistently outperform others despite having access to similar products, resources and market opportunities.
The Risk of Knowledge Being Trapped
Every organisation has individuals who seem to know everything. They understand the customers, have built strong relationships, navigate complex situations effectively and consistently deliver results. These high performers are valuable assets but they can also represent a significant business risk.
When knowledge is held primarily by individuals rather than embedded within the organisation, problems quickly emerge, knowledge becomes trapped. critical insights remain undocumented, best practices are not shared and new employees struggle to learn what makes top performers successful. And if those individuals leave the organisation, much of that expertise leaves with them.
Many businesses only recognise this problem after an experienced employee moves on and performance suddenly declines. The most successful organisations actively capture and transfer knowledge through coaching, training and structured development programmes rather than relying on informal learning alone.
