We prepare people for law, medicine, finance, and engineering. The one skill that drives every organisation's survival, the ability to sell is almost entirely absent from formal education. And we have quietly accepted that as normal.
Think about how most salespeople learn to sell. They join a company, sit with a senior colleague, shadow a few calls, absorb whatever habits happen to exist in that environment, then they are handed a territory and a target. What they learn in those early weeks is not selling. It is the specific language, the particular shortcuts, and the occasional blind spots of whoever sat next to them first.
We would never train a surgeon by having them watch someone operate for three weeks and then handing them a scalpel. Yet this is almost exactly how most salespeople enter the profession.
What Was Never Taught
The Curriculum That Should Have Existed
The absence of sales from academic curricula reflects a long-held belief that selling is less intellectual or less teachable than other disciplines. That belief is wrong and it has cost us enormously. A genuine sales education would cover ground that is rigorous, learnable, and deeply consequential:
Human psychology and decision-making, why people buy, how emotion and logic interact, what cognitive biases shape every purchase decision Conversation architecture, when to speak, when to pause, how to ask questions that open rather than close, how to listen at a level that builds genuine trust Commercial and financial literacy, reading a P&L, understanding a buyer's budget cycle, articulating ROI in the language of the person who controls the budget Negotiation and value positioning, studied extensively in law and business schools, almost never as part of a structured sales curriculum Resilience and emotional regulation, the psychological demands of repeated rejection, long uncertainty, and sustained belief through complex cycles
Sales is not an instinct. It is a discipline. Disciplines that go untaught do not disappear, they develop unevenly, inconsistently, and entirely by accident.
The Implication
What Sales Leaders Must Build
Most salespeople are already in the field, carrying a quota. They cannot wait for academia to catch up. The responsibility for building what formal education never provided falls on sales leadership and the most effective organisations treat development as a genuine curriculum, not a series of one-off training events.
That means structured onboarding that goes beyond product knowledge, ongoing coaching that treats every real conversation as a learning opportunity, deliberate practice in environments that create the repetition needed for real skill development, and a culture where learning is visibly modelled by leadership, not prescribed only for those who are struggling.
In My View
Sales is a serious, learnable, and endlessly developable craft. The organisations that treat it that way, that build real curricula and hold learning as a genuine leadership priority are the ones building teams that compound in capability over time. The rest are hoping that osmosis is enough. It never was, and in today's buying environment, the cost of that hope has never been higher.
A question worth asking: If you mapped the skills your sales team actually needs against what they were deliberately taught, not picked up, not absorbed, but genuinely taught how wide would that gap be?
Sales Igniter
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Actionable insights that fuel learning, growing and thriving, from Leenna Jayachaandran, published weekly on LinkedIn.
