Sales challenges ahead of 2027: Catching up Sales trainings with Sales strategies

A more demanding market calls for better decisions

Germany's economic recovery is gaining momentum, but the outlook remains uneven. The Federal Government's October 2026 forecast anticipates GDP growth of 1.1% in 2027, while private investment is expected to remain subdued.

The gap between investment needs and actual spending plans is particularly revealing. According to KfW Research, 92% of the German businesses surveyed reported a need to invest, but only 61% planned investment projects over the following twelve months. Almost half had experienced declining demand.

An investment need, evidently, does not always translate into an investment decision.

For B2B sales teams, this matters. Customers may recognise the value of a solution while remaining reluctant to commit. Projects can compete for limited budgets, purchasing decisions take place under greater scrutiny, and established customer relationships offer no guarantee of continued growth.

These conditions affect industries differently, and no sales methodology can remove economic uncertainty. But they do make the quality of commercial decisions increasingly consequential: which opportunities deserve attention, where additional customer potential exists, and what it will take to move a purchasing decision forward.

Companies understandably want their sales teams to become more effective. The difficulty begins when they assume that effectiveness means the same thing for every salesperson.

The problem with training everyone to sell better

Sales development is frequently organised around familiar competencies: negotiation, communication, objection handling, prospecting and closing. All are legitimate areas of professional development.

Their relevance, however, depends on the commercial challenge.

A company entering an unfamiliar market needs salespeople capable of evaluating opportunities before established assumptions become expensive mistakes. They must understand new customer segments, recognise differences in purchasing behaviour and build credibility without relying on existing relationships. Adaptability and commercial judgement matter here, alongside the ability to gather and critically interpret market intelligence.

An organisation pursuing growth within existing accounts faces an entirely different problem.

Its salespeople already have access to customers, established relationships and valuable knowledge of their businesses. Those advantages can become limitations when familiarity replaces curiosity. Account development requires the ability to recognise changing customer priorities, identify opportunities beyond established contacts and engage stakeholders who may have little involvement in the original purchasing relationship.

This has become a particularly important commercial priority. When Gartner surveyed 243 sales executives about their priorities in 2025, 73% were focusing on growth from existing customers.

Meanwhile, organisations pursuing large, complex contracts encounter another obstacle: the buyer is rarely one person.

Technical stakeholders may be convinced while procurement remains sceptical. Finance evaluates different risks from the operational team. Senior leadership may support the business case but disagree on implementation priorities.

And internal disagreement is hardly unusual. Among the B2B buying teams Gartner surveyed in 2025, 74% demonstrated what the researchers classified as unhealthy conflict during the purchasing process.

Selling successfully into such an environment involves considerably more than presenting a convincing value proposition to an interested contact. Salespeople must understand the interests surrounding a decision, recognise competing priorities and help stakeholders establish enough common ground to move forward.

The skills involved overlap, certainly. But a salesperson developing an unfamiliar market, an account manager expanding a longstanding customer relationship and a commercial lead navigating a complex buying group are doing fundamentally different work.

A standardised training curriculum may provide a useful foundation. It cannot, by itself, account for those differences.

And if an organisation knows precisely which markets, customers and deal types are supposed to drive its next phase of growth, it should be able to explain which capabilities those ambitions demand.

When a skills problem isn't actually a skills problem

There is another complication. Even identifying the right skills doesn't guarantee that sales behaviour will change.

Organisations sometimes interpret insufficient commercial initiative as a question of attitude. Salespeople need to take more ownership, approach customers more confidently or demonstrate greater ambition.

That explanation may occasionally be correct. But it deserves scrutiny before becoming the basis for a development programme.

Sales behaviour is shaped by more than individual competence. It is also influenced by the expectations managers communicate, the priorities they reinforce and the processes through which work gets done.

An organisation that wants more strategic account development needs to examine how account managers actually spend their time. Are customer reviews concerned with uncovering new opportunities or primarily with reporting the existing pipeline? Is there room to develop relationships whose commercial value may take months to materialise? Do managers encourage thoughtful exploration, or does every conversation eventually return to the next quarterly forecast?

These questions matter because development can produce knowledge without changing the conditions under which that knowledge is applied.

Research on learning transfer offers useful evidence here. Researchers at TU Braunschweig examined the factors that influence how employees apply what they've learned in a 2026 study in Frontiers in Organizational Psychology. Their findings highlighted the relevance of training applicability, feedback and organisational support, among other factors. The research reinforces a broader point: employees' ability to apply newly acquired skills depends partly on what happens outside the training itself.

Sales leadership is therefore part of the development equation. Managers help establish what good performance looks like, provide opportunities to practise unfamiliar approaches and reinforce behaviours through regular conversations and routines.

Those routines also determine whether the tools available to sales teams are genuinely useful. An organisation pursuing account expansion, for instance, needs more than a CRM that tracks the value and status of existing opportunities. Account managers need relevant customer intelligence, a way to document emerging needs and regular opportunities to turn that information into commercial decisions. AI-supported research may make gathering information faster, but it cannot determine which customer signals deserve attention or whether an opportunity is worth pursuing. That still requires commercial judgement, supported by working practices that put the information to use.

The uncomfortable possibility is that some apparent skills gaps are actually problems of leadership, incentives or work organisation.

Training cannot compensate indefinitely for an environment that rewards the very behaviour an organisation claims it wants to change.

A growth target is not a development brief

For HR and Sales leaders, the practical consequence is a different approach to diagnosing development needs.

A company seeking growth from existing customers should investigate where account development stalls. Perhaps account managers struggle to recognise new customer needs. Perhaps they lack access to relevant decision-makers. Perhaps promising opportunities are identified but receive little follow-through because existing sales routines prioritise immediate transactions.

Each explanation suggests a different response.

A capability gap might call for developing consultative questioning, stakeholder management or strategic account planning. A lack of relevant customer information could require better processes and data access. Inconsistent follow-through might point toward managerial routines and accountability.

The distinction matters because the same disappointing commercial result can have several causes. Revenue figures and pipeline reports show where performance falls short; they rarely explain the full reason.

Development decisions become more useful when organisations connect the commercial objective with the specific behaviours employees need to demonstrate, the capabilities underpinning those behaviours and the conditions required for their application.

This is also where Business-Critical Skills become relevant. Commercial performance depends on combinations of capabilities: collaboration and relationship-building, self-direction and judgement, and the ability to use digital information responsibly. Their importance is determined by the work people must perform.

Not every salesperson needs a completely individual learning programme. Teams facing similar challenges can develop capabilities together. The important distinction is between standardising development for convenience and designing it around a genuine shared need.

Measurement needs the same discipline. Training participation and satisfaction provide information about the learning experience, but limited insight into whether people work differently afterwards. Behavioural indicators—such as how account opportunities are developed or how stakeholder conversations are conducted—can provide a more relevant view of progress. Business results remain essential, although they will always be influenced by factors beyond training.

For German sales organisations planning 2027, capability development should be treated as a strategic investment, with the same attention to relevance and execution that companies apply to other commercial decisions.

That may lead to better sales training. It may lead to changes in leadership, processes or priorities. In some cases, it may reveal that the organisation has been trying to solve the wrong problem altogether.

A sales strategy deserves more than a revenue target and a training calendar.

It needs a credible account of what people will have to do differently to make the numbers possible.

‍

‍

The question of which capabilities, tools and leadership routines sales teams actually need will also be at the centre of DeepSkill's upcoming webinar, Sales readiness 2027: Skills, Tools und Führungsroutinen, die Vertrieb erfolgreich machen, on 20 November 2026. Achim Hirsch and Laura Charlotte Kottwitz will explore how organisations can turn commercial objectives into effective market and account development, with practical methods and an interactive Sales Readiness Pulse.

‍

Sources

Bundesregierung. (2026, 8. Oktober). The German economy is growing again: The Federal Government's autumn 2026 forecast. https://www.bundesregierung.de/breg-en/service/autumn-forecast-2026-federal-government-2456430

Gartner. (2025, 7. Mai). Gartner sales survey finds 74% of B2B buyer teams demonstrate unhealthy conflict during the decision process. https://www.gartner.com/en/newsroom/press-releases/2025-05-07-gartner-sales-survey-finds-74-percent-of-b2b-buyer-teams-demonstrate-unhealthy-conflict-during-the-decision-process

Gartner. (2025, 20. Mai). Gartner survey finds 73% of CSOs are prioritizing growth from existing customers for 2025. https://www.gartner.com/en/newsroom/press-releases/2025-05-20-gartner-survey-finds-73-percent-of-csos-are-prioritizing-growth-from-existing-customers-for-2025

KfW Research. (2026, 1. Juli). KfW Research: Businesses report high investment needs but fewer investment plans. https://www.kfw.de/About-KfW/Newsroom/Latest-News/Pressemitteilungen-Details_899776.html

Mehner, L., Rothenbusch, S., & Kauffeld, S. (2026). When formal training leads to informal learning among colleagues: Antecedents of training transfer and knowledge sharing. Frontiers in Organizational Psychology, 4, Article 1705256. https://doi.org/10.3389/forgp.2026.1705256

‍

‍