Why Your Best Sellers Ignore Your Best Tools

Experience built your career. If not leveraged wisely it could be harming your deals.

Every workshop I run, I witness experienced sellers dismiss structured planning frameworks with a wave of the hand. They've earned that confidence through hundreds of closed deals. But in my opinion that confidence and accuracy don't correlate the way we think they do.

Research conducted in Finance for example shows that 74% of professional fund managers believe they're above average at their job. Statistically impossible, yet entirely predictable.

Your experienced sellers might just fall into the same trap, I know I have.

The Experience Paradox

Here's what nobody wants to admit: experience strengthens overconfidence bias rather than reducing it. The more deals your veterans close, the more certain they become. The more certain they become, the less they question their approach.

They trust their gut. Their gut trusts the past. The past doesn't always match the present.

The B2B landscape transformed while your top performers were perfecting their instincts. Buying groups have grown in size, often 10-12 stakeholders in the core buying group alone. Purchase likelihood drops significantly when moving from one to two decision makers, let alone 12.

Your veterans built their mental models in a less complex buying world. Single decision makers. Clearer authority. Faster cycles.

That world, if it hasn’t disappeared yet, is diminishing rapidly. 

Why Frameworks Get Rejected

Experienced sellers resist structured planning because it often feels like an insult to their expertise or their well established relationships. They've internalised patterns through repetition. Those patterns worked. Why would they abandon what works? I would not either!

Because what worked then may not work as well today. Buyers are different now. The buying structures have changed.

The issue isn't that your veterans lack skill. They sometimes lack context awareness for how radically buying behaviour has really shifted. Their pattern recognition optimised for an environment that no longer exists.

Structured frameworks entice sellers to interrogate their assumptions. To map stakeholder ecosystems. To identify digital signals. To test their gut against current reality.

That's not always uncomfortable, but we all know how valuable this can be.

Thinking Skills Over Techniques

I focus on teaching thinking skills that become intrinsic. Not scripts. Not techniques. Mental frameworks that help sellers understand valuable context before they craft solutions.

The goal isn't to eliminate intuition. Intuition matters immensely, but unchecked intuition in a transformed market might produce expensive mistakes.

Structured planning tools do something critical: they make thinking visible. They ask sellers to articulate why they believe what they believe. They create space between instinct and action. And more importantly, they connect the dots between what we sell and the outcomes customers can achieve.

That space is where deals get won.

Your best sellers want frameworks that respect their experience while challenging their assumptions. Tools that feel like navigation aids, not  bureaucratic and internally focussed inspection tools.

The Path Forward

Sales leaders face a choice. Keep letting veterans fly on instinct alone, or give them tools that help them test that instinct.

The market already decided which approach wins. Buyers demand deeper business understanding. Longer sales cycles require sustained engagement across multiple stakeholders. Gut feel can't map that complexity.

Your experienced sellers can and want to adapt. They need frameworks that enhance their expertise rather than replace it, or worse ignore it. Thinking skills that become second nature. Context awareness that matches current buying reality.

The question for sales leaders: Are you teaching your team what to say, or how to think? Do you have a coaching plan and the right questions to ask in your coaching sessions?