In industries like healthcare, manufacturing, and high-tech, the best salespeople often aren't career salespeople at all.
They're clinicians, engineers, and subject matter experts who've crossed over – bringing deep domain knowledge but sometimes struggling to translate it into commercial results.
In this episode of Mastering Sales & Negotiations, Jane Banks, founder of Pure Valegro and a training specialist with over 30 years of experience, unpacks why that transition is so challenging – and what organisations can do to bridge the gap. Her message is both practical and honest: expertise is the entry ticket, but it cannot be the whole game.
When a skilled professional moves into a sales role, they usually arrive with something powerful: genuine belief in the product, credibility in the environment, and deep knowledge of the customer's world. In healthcare, that might mean a former ICU nurse selling into intensive care units, or a clinical specialist who used the very device they're now demoing.
However, that expertise – the thing that makes them credible – can also be their biggest obstacle.
Subject matter knowledge becomes a safety blanket. When in doubt, technically skilled salespeople default to what they know: features, data, clinical evidence, mechanisms of action. They talk at customers rather than with them. Jane calls it "substance over style" – the belief that if you explain enough, thoroughly enough, the customer will be persuaded by logic alone.
But we all know that logic is not persuasive. And being right is not the same as being convincing.
A simple but memorable example from Jane's career makes the point: when demoing a piece of medical equipment, a clinician-turned-salesperson would naturally stand directly in front of it, just as they did when using it for patient care. Small habit. Wrong context. Because in a sales demo, you're not operating the device – you're helping the people watching understand it.
These small behavioural shifts are what separates technical competence from commercial effectiveness.
One of Jane's most consistent pieces of advice is deceptively simple: park your expertise at the door and walk in curious.
She's candid that one of her own strengths as a trainer is that she isn't a subject matter expert in the fields she trains. That means she has to ask questions. She has to understand before she can respond. And that genuine curiosity – "help me understand how what you're doing now is working for you" – is exactly the posture that unlocks a real sales conversation.
For technically skilled professionals, this is genuinely hard. They've built their identity around knowing the answers. Being curious can feel like weakness. But the best salespeople understand that the questions are the point.
A story shared during the episode captures this beautifully. A bed salesperson, rather than recommending the softest mattress to a customer complaining of back pain, asked a single question: "What about the eight hours when you're asleep?" That one question reframed the entire conversation – and led the customer to a solution they hadn't considered. The salesperson had all the technical knowledge about springs, firmness, and support. But they used one question to change everything.
That's SPIN in action. That's curiosity over expertise.
In healthcare – and in many high-technology environments – buying decisions are never made by one person. Clinical champions, procurement teams, IT departments, finance leads, pharmacists, biomedical engineers: the stakeholder map is wide and often unpredictable.
Jane points to a concept she's always found useful here: receptivity, dissatisfaction, and power. Technical experts naturally gravitate toward the people whose clinical language they share. But the decision is shaped by the whole group – and sometimes the most influential voice in the room is unexpected. It might be a head nurse. A chief pharmacist. A technician known simply as Fred who, if not brought on side, will quietly ensure the product sits in a cupboard unused.
This has a direct commercial consequence. Winning the sale is not the same as delivering value. If the actual users aren't convinced, order fulfilment suffers – and the commercial case quietly falls apart, even after the paperwork is signed.
Getting technically skilled salespeople to understand and navigate this wider ecosystem is one of the real challenges in commercial training.
One of Jane's strongest convictions is that product training and commercial training should never be separated.
Train people on features, and features are what they'll talk about. But if you build commercial application into every product training session – what will you say to a customer about this? What questions will you ask? How will you engage them without leading with what the product does? – you start to change how people think, not just what they know.
The curriculum Jane developed moved through product knowledge, commercial integration, coaching, and rigorous assessment. Certification pass marks were raised from 80% to 90% not to make life harder, but to build a culture of learning and genuine application. "Do you want someone who's 90% sure of what they're talking about, or 80% sure?"
The answer shapes a culture.
If product training is the foundation, sales manager coaching is the accelerant. Jane is unequivocal about this: without good managers who coach consistently, training simply doesn't stick.
She shares a story from early in her own career – a senior leader who called her every Friday and casually asked about the sales figures. She didn't know the answer the first week. Or the second. By the third Friday, she had spoken to the management accountant and was ready. Nobody wants to be caught not knowing.
That's coaching in its simplest form. A small number of consistent questions, asked regularly, that create the conditions for people to prepare, to think ahead, and to take ownership.
For technical salespeople, those questions might be: what's your planned advance for this call? What benefit statement are you aiming to reach? What's your opening question? Simple. Consistent. Transformative over time.
The best sales managers Jane has worked with embed this into everything – including how they use CRM data. Rather than a tickbox exercise, one manager she admired ran a structured "ladder" system where every stage of the sales process was mapped and agreed by the team. Weekly coaching conversations weren't about whether targets were hit; they were about evidence – where are you on the ladder, and what does that mean for the next step?
That kind of structure creates a shared language, team cohesion, and genuine accountability.
It would be easy to conclude that sales managers simply need to do better. Jane pushes back firmly on this.
Sales managers are frequently exceptional account managers who were promoted overnight – and then left to figure out leadership on their own. They are managing product shortages, back-order pressures, reporting demands, team conflicts, and senior expectations simultaneously. Telling them to "coach more" without support, structure, or time is not a strategy.
The approach Jane developed – "Sales Manager Moments," a one-hour monthly session designed to re-energise, inspire, and remind – is deliberately not labelled as training. It's an hour for them. Guest speakers. Practical reminders. Intellectual stimulation. Recognition that their job is genuinely hard, and that the organisation is invested in helping them do it well.
The difference between organisations where leadership invests in their sales managers and those that don't? Visible. Within months.
Training events are not enough. The gym analogy Jane uses is apt: you don't train every muscle group once and then expect peak performance. You build capacity across everything, over time, so that when you need a specific skill in a specific moment, you can access it.
Reinforcement structures matter here – and the format matters too. Jane's team built an "omnichannel" approach: nano-learnings dropped into email inboxes post-training, asking one quick question a couple of times a week. E-learning for self-paced consolidation. Virtual sessions. Face-to-face. Big webinars. Every format serving a different point in the learning journey, meeting people where they are.
The critical watch-out: reinforcement that measures the wrong things is worse than no reinforcement at all. Asking whether people remember that the buttons are now blue doesn't develop commercial thinking. Questions that reinforce the why, the so what, and the what would you do – those are the ones that build real capability over time.
Jane's experience spans healthcare across EMEA, food manufacturing, and a wide range of high-technology sectors. The pattern she sees is consistent: organisations that invest in their people – even when times are tough – retain them, develop them, and ultimately outperform.
The message for leaders is that technical expertise is the entry ticket. It's what gets your salespeople through the door, establishes their credibility, and earns the right to the conversation. But from there, it's a different set of muscles entirely.
Curiosity over expertise. Questions over answers. Preparation over improvisation. Coaching over instruction.
Build those habits – at every level of the organisation – and technical excellence becomes a genuine commercial advantage.
Jane Banks, Founder and Managing Director of Pure Valegro, is a perceptive and commercially astute speaker, coach, mentor and trainer. She has extensive experience driving growth and change across complex organisations, particularly within pharmaceuticals, medical devices and FMCG. Known for her powerful storytelling and omnichannel learning approach, Jane consistently helps teams translate technical expertise into meaningful commercial impact.
This episode of Mastering Sales & Negotiation is available now. Follow the full series here or wherever you listen to podcasts.