What 12 Years in Sales Taught Me About Continuous Improvement

When I moved into continuous improvement after 12 years in sales and business development, I assumed I was starting over to a large extent. New discipline. New language. New set of tools to learn. I'd be the person in the room who knew the least — at least for a while.

What I didn't expect was how much of what I already knew would turn out to be the most useful thing I brought to the table.

The moment it clicked

I worked for a major mining company and my first few Lean projects were in a remote area of Australia working with some fairly tough nuts. I remember sitting across the desk with a Site Leader along with my Manager, to discuss the initiative of improving their stock piles at the port where his product was loaded and shipped.

Here was my first big project. I felt like I was wearing a merit badge from the central office, but here was this guy telling me, politely, but very directly, that he was not going to implement any changes to the way they stockpile product at port. I remember realizing I had nowhere to turn, I realized I had nothing to handle this objection. I'm still only a few months old in this world called Lean. I felt like a 'deer in headlights' as the saying goes.

He wasn't difficult, but he certainly wasn't moving. I finally tried various angles on and off during my few days on site. Every conversation ended the same way, nothing was changing. I tried explaining the methodology and he hit back with some other Lean terminology that I wasn't completely familiar with at the time.

The central office had the data even, why won't he listen?

Without really thinking about it, I stopped presenting, I stopped trying to convince him and started asking. Not questions designed to guide him toward my conclusion. Genuine questions. The kind I used to ask in sales when I didn't understand why a customer wasn't buying.

"What would have to be true for this to actually work for you?"

I allowed him to speak for the first time. What I learned was that he wasn't actually blocking the project — he explained the challenges he faced trying to make such a huge change as well as keep up with the demand of high performance at his site. This project wouldn't be one they could simply throw every resource at just because the big boss said so.

I learned more about life in that interaction than I realized. I think I was literally trying to sell him on the improvement idea instead of actually working with my customer and fully understanding the problem we were trying to solve.

What sales actually teaches you

People who haven't worked in sales often have a narrow view of what it involves. Pitching. Persuading. Closing. That's the surface. The real discipline is the part that takes years to develop and is something else entirely.

It's learning to read a room. Understanding what someone isn't saying. Knowing when to push and when to pause. Building enough trust that people tell you what they actually think rather than what they think you want to hear. Breaking down barriers, building a little trust. It's understanding that resistance is never random. There's always a reason. And the reason is almost never the one that is stated on the surface.

That's not a sales skill. That's a human skill. And it turns out it's the most important skill in continuous improvement.

The reframe that changes everything

Here's what I've come to believe after nearly 30 years across both disciplines:

The hard situations a Lean practitioner faces in the field are objection handling.
The shop floor team that won't engage — that's an objection.
The project sponsor who agreed in the room and has since gone quiet — that's an objection.
The senior leader who says the right things and does nothing — that's an objection.

And like every objection in sales, the worst thing you can do is argue with it. The right move is to understand it first. What's underneath it and what history, fear, or unmet need is driving it. Because once you understand that, the path forward usually becomes clear.

Most continuous improvement practitioners are trained in the methodology. Very few are trained in the human side of things.

That's the gap.

What this means in practice

I'm not suggesting every Lean practitioner needs a background in sales. What I am suggesting is that the human side of change — trust, resistance, influence, decision-making — deserves the same level of serious attention we give to the tools.

Because here's the reality: a mediocre methodology applied by someone who genuinely understands people will outperform a perfect methodology applied by someone who doesn't every single time. The tools are important. They're just not sufficient.

The rest of the work happens in the gap — the space between what the methodology says and what people actually do when it shows up at their door. That's where the real practice of continuous improvement lives.