“People don’t want to buy a quarter-inch drill. They want a quarter-inch hole!”
- Theodore Levitt
ABX Corp, a reputed pharmaceutical company headquartered in Sweden, had just finished rebuilding their Sales and Marketing team for the APAC region. These were not fresh hires. They were experienced professionals with strong track records and years of industry experience behind them. And yet, their new weight loss drug was going nowhere in the market.
The CEO had a clear explanation: his team could not sell. He hired a well-regarded training firm to fix it. The training was well-received. Participants rated it highly. And when it was over, the numbers did not move. Not even a little. He fired the vendor and reached out to us at Learn4ever, convinced that what his team needed was simply better training.
We have seen this before. And we knew enough to pause before agreeing.
The problem
When the CEO called us, Selene, our head of L&D at Learn4ever, took the meeting. She listened carefully to everything he laid out: the underperformance, the failed training, the frustration. But something did not add up. A team of experienced sales professionals, people who had delivered results elsewhere, suddenly unable to sell? Before recommending anything, Selene asked for one thing: a conversation with the sales team themselves.
What she heard was very different from what the CEO had described.
The mystery starts unravelling.... slowly...
The drug ABX Corp was trying to sell was not meaningfully different from products already available in the market. It was priced higher than its competitors. The APAC region, particularly the markets they were targeting, was already crowded, and prescribers had not been given a compelling reason to switch. Doctors and medical professionals in the region were still unconvinced about the drug's clinical value. The sales team was not failing because they lacked skill. They were being asked to sell something the market had not accepted, at a price it would not justify, against competitors who had arrived earlier and built relationships long before ABX Corp entered the picture.
No sales training was going to change any of that.
This is the pattern that repeats across industries. When Nokia's sales began declining as iPhone and Android took hold across Asia and Europe, the instinct was to push harder on sales performance. The salespeople were not the problem. The products were.
Why the first training failed
The previous vendor likely delivered exactly what they were asked to. The failure was not in the execution. It was in accepting a brief built on the wrong diagnosis. When you train a team that does not have a skill problem, you get exactly what ABX Corp got: a programme that everyone liked and nothing that changed. The harder professional move, the one that actually serves the client, is to say clearly: this is not a training problem.
Robert Mager, whose work on performance analysis still holds up decades later, framed it well: if someone could perform correctly if their life depended on it, then a skill gap is not what you are dealing with. Something else is in the way. Find that first.
How Learn4ever resolved it
Selene's recommendation to ABX Corp was not a training programme. It was a repositioning exercise.
The drug's price was not going to change. But the conversation around it could. Instead of leading with the product in a crowded market where price comparisons were inevitable, the focus shifted to what genuinely set it apart: documented clinical effectiveness and a significantly lower side effect profile compared to the alternatives already on the market. That was a story prescribers could engage with. And it was a conversation the sales team could have confidently, because it was grounded in clinical evidence rather than a pricing argument they were never going to win.
The sales team did not need to learn how to sell. They needed something worth selling to a sceptical audience, framed in language that audience actually responded to.
When Pfizer launched Viagra across Asian markets in the late 1990s, it ran into significant prescriber resistance rooted in cultural stigma and clinical skepticism. Rather than compete on price or push sales volume, Pfizer invested in physician education, clinical data sharing, and reframing the conversation entirely: from lifestyle drug to recognised medical treatment. Prescriber confidence followed. Sales followed that. ABX Corp's path was not so different.
The end
Once the clinical story was told properly to the right people, the market began to open. Prescribers who had been unmoved by sales visits started engaging. The same team that had sat through two rounds of sales training, and delivered nothing, started closing. Because the problem had finally been solved correctly.
Image credit: Google
Examples sourced by: Claude
Thoughts and narrative: Aswin
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