The manufacturing sector is undergoing a quiet but profound transformation, and sales organizations are under increasing pressure to keep up. For many manufacturers, especially those backed by private equity, the mandate to sales leaders is clear: grow faster, win more deals, and do so with fewer resources. But in a world where technical expertise no longer guarantees commercial success, many manufacturing sales teams are struggling to adapt.
This blog post outlines how sales leaders in the manufacturing industry can overcome sales challenges and help their salespeople navigate complex sales and win more deals.
The Manufacturing Sales Landscape: Complex, Fragmented, and Under Pressure
Amid shifting buyer expectations, digital transformation, and aggressive private equity timelines, manufacturer sales organizations are being forced to rethink the fundamentals of how they sell. For many, that process is proving difficult.
Traditionally manufacturing sales teams have leaned on product expertise, legacy relationships, ad hoc selling styles and engineers-turned-sales reps to move business forward. But today’s B2B buyers are more informed, more skeptical, and more resistant to technical jargon. They demand solutions, outcomes, and a clear business case, not just product specs and legacy credibility.
As McKinsey notes, nearly 80% of B2B buyers now prefer a rep-free sales experience for repeat purchases, and more than 70% are comfortable spending $50,000 or more in a purely digital channel
This shift puts pressure on manufacturing sales reps to evolve from product experts into value translators, a leap that many manufacturing sales teams are unprepared to make. The result is a growing sales performance gap between aggressive growth targets and the sales team’s ability to execute against them.
Structural Issues That Impact Manufacturing Sales Team Performance
Manufacturers face a unique constellation of structural challenges that compound these market changes:
- Fragmented Manufacturing Sales Teams: As manufacturers grow through acquisition, manufacturing sales teams often operate in silos. Each division may follow its own approach, CRM logic, or even compensation philosophy, which leads to friction, confusion, and inconsistent execution.
- Legacy Selling Mindsets: Many manufacturing sales reps in manufacturing have decades of technical experience but little exposure to modern sales methodology. Their strength is in explaining “how it works,” not selling “why it matters.” This often results in solution dumping, price-driven conversations, or failing to connect with strategic buyer needs.
- Lack of Repeatable Sales Process: Even successful salespeople often succeed despite the system, not because of it. Without a shared language or defined pipeline stages, sales efforts become dependent on individual personality and instinct rather than structured methodology.
- Talent Gaps: According to the National Association of Manufacturers, the manufacturing industry faces a projected shortage of 2.1 million skilled jobs by 2030, many of which include commercial-facing roles. Younger talent often lacks manufacturing context, while veterans may lack sales adaptability.
Why PE-Backed Manufacturers Are Feeling the Squeeze
For private equity-backed firms, the urgency is even greater. With defined exit timelines and aggressive revenue targets, these companies are under pressure to generate consistent top-line growth in compressed windows. Yet when manufacturing sales teams operate with outdated structures or lack the tools to scale, leadership is left navigating blind spots in the commercial engine.
These organizations don’t have the luxury of waiting. They need sales systems that drive repeatable outcomes, measurable KPIs, and behavioral change quickly and sustainably.
What Happens If Your Manufacturing Sales Team Doesn’t Evolve?
Failure to address these challenges has real, measurable costs:
- Flat or stalled revenue, even in markets with growth opportunity
- Margin erosion due to reliance on discounting instead of value selling
- Turnover in the field, especially when reps feel unsupported or overwhelmed
- Executive frustration, stemming from limited visibility and poor sales forecasting
These issues aren’t caused by a lack of effort; they’re caused by a lack of alignment. Modern manufacturing demands modern selling: one rooted in insight, process, and accountability.
The Engagement: Sales Training Data Before Development
Too often, manufacturing sales training engagements begin with assumptions: about what’s broken, what skills are missing, and what success looks like. But in complex, high-stakes environments like manufacturing, especially those shaped by private equity and acquisition, those assumptions can lead to costly missteps. That’s why Tyson Group approaches every engagement with a clear mandate: diagnose first, then design.
That was precisely the approach taken in our work with a national plastics manufacturer. Backed by private equity, multiple acquisitions under its belt, and pursuing an aggressive revenue growth target (14% year-over-year, well above the industry average) the organization needed a solution not just for sales training, but to transform.
They needed a scalable strategy for building sales capability across a fragmented, technically-oriented sales team.
Using our Sales Team Science™ diagnostic and individual sales talent assessments, we delivered an objective view of what was working, what wasn’t, and where targeted intervention could move the needle most effectively.
We discovered that while the manufacturing sales organization had strong cultural alignment and experienced salespeople, it lacked the infrastructure and a custom sales methodology to support scalable growth.
The diagnostic phase revealed three pivotal gaps:
- No consistent sales methodology, leading to varied approaches and missed opportunities
- Unstructured sales process, making pipeline management and CRM usage ineffective
- Misaligned compensation and accountability systems, failing to drive prospecting and new logo acquisition
Unsurprisingly, technical competence was strong across the board. But foundational selling skills—especially in prospecting, objection handling, and value articulation—were uneven.
Leadership lacked the sales coaching structure and clarity to reinforce change, creating risk that any future training would fade without accountability.
Why a Data-Driven Approach to Manufacturing Sales Training Matters
In many organizations, sales training is reactive, a response to missed targets or low morale. But here, this manufacturer took a strategic approach. They invested in visibility first: into their team, their systems, and their operational friction points. This created alignment across stakeholders, built trust in the solution, and laid the groundwork for meaningful change.
As McKinsey notes, companies that embed diagnostics into their sales improvement efforts are nearly 40% more likely to hit aggressive growth targets than those that jump straight into training or restructuring.
The takeaway? You can’t fix what you can’t see. And in complex manufacturing and industrial environments, clarity is a competitive advantage.
Lessons in Sales Transformation: 4 Strategies for Manufacturing Sales Leaders to Embrace
Sales transformation in manufacturing isn’t about motivation, it’s about method. The traditional sales playbook (leaning on technical specs, tribal knowledge, and personality) simply doesn’t hold up in today’s competitive, complex selling environment.
Across the manufacturing sector, sales organizations are facing systemic challenges that can’t be solved with more effort alone. What’s needed is a shift in mindset, from reactive activity to intentional execution, and a strategic structure to support it.
1. Diagnostics Must Come Before Sales Development
Organizations often move straight to sales training without identifying the true drivers of underperformance. By starting with organizational diagnostics and individual talent assessments, this client uncovered root causes such as inconsistent methodology, compensation misalignment, and weak sales manager coaching.
This approach aligns with Bain & Company research showing that revenue transformations grounded in rigorous diagnostics significantly improve the likelihood of sustained success.
2. Engineers Don’t Make Natural Sellers, But They Can Become Exceptional Ones
Manufacturers often rely on technically proficient, engineer-minded individuals to drive sales. While these team members bring deep product expertise, they often lack training in commercial conversations, objection handling, and value positioning. This client’s investment in custom training, tailored to their reps’ learning styles and backgrounds, closed that gap without compromising technical credibility.
According to Salesforce’s State of Sales Report, only 28% of sales professionals strongly agree they have the skills needed to succeed in today’s selling environment, highlighting widespread confidence and capability gaps in areas like negotiation, discovery, and value-based selling. Without targeted development, that gap continues to erode margins and stall deals.
3. Manufacturing Sales Training Must Move Beyond Product and Relationships
Modern manufacturing sales training needs to address how customers buy, not just what sellers sell. That means coaching discovery frameworks, objection handling, story-based persuasion, and how to compete on value rather than price. Tyson Group’s Human Sales Factor™ methodology was adapted to this manufacturer’s context, equipping reps to engage customers on a deeper, more strategic level.
High-growth companies are 2.3x more likely to invest in behavioral-based sales training than average performers, according to McKinsey. It’s not just about knowing more, it’s about executing better.
4. Manufacturing Sales Leadership Is the Fulcrum of Sustainable Change
Sustainable sales transformation accelerates when frontline manufacturing sales managers coach behavior in a consistent weekly cadence, reinforce methodology in live deals, and build accountability into pipeline routines. In this client’s rollout, sales managers trained alongside the team, then used structured 1:1 coaching to inspect discovery quality, objection handling, and next-step discipline.
Research cited in a Salesforce-hosted report shows that organizations adding coaching to training efforts perform 4x better than training without coaching, and teams with dynamic coaching report higher win rates.
How a Data-Driven Strategy Transforms Manufacturing Sales Performance
In an industry defined by complexity, consolidation, and constant pressure to grow, manufacturing sales organizations cannot afford to rely on what has always worked. Growth today requires visibility into performance gaps, disciplined execution, and structured alignment between sales leadership, sales managers, and sales talent. And a data-driven approach replaces assumption with insight and activity with accountability.
If your manufacturing sales team is being asked to grow without greater clarity, it’s time to shift from reactive training to data-driven performance strategy. Contact Tyson Group today to discover what is working, where friction exists, and how to engineer predictable revenue growth.
