In Brussels we sat down with sales and training leaders from medical technology companies to talk about one question: how do you develop sales expertise fast enough for a market that keeps changing the job? Three themes came out of the conversation. Each of them maps onto something the research on expertise has been saying for years.
Training the complexity, and reading the room
Developing sales expertise is no longer about memorizing scripts. It is about thinking in context. As André Brauers from Zeiss Medical Technology put it, "We're moving from product selling to workflow solution selling. It requires new mindsets and skills that go beyond technical knowledge."
The shift is from promoting a product to managing an ecosystem of decision-makers. Tanja Feldmueller of Ulrich Medical described it from the field: "Our sales reps used to focus on one surgeon. Now they have to deal with procurement, hygiene, and reimbursement teams, often all at once. That's a completely different job."
Hugo Cardoso from Abbott added the organizational side: "We need consistency across countries but flexibility for local realities. Account management doesn't mean the same in Germany as in Norway, yet the core skills must remain scalable."
That last point resonated with everyone. Training has to balance structure and adaptability, exactly like the sales strategies it is meant to build.
What the research says
Elena Ciani, our Head of Neuroscience, explained the principle behind the challenge: "Expertise forms when people practice complex skills repeatedly from different perspectives. That's how they build automaticity and flexibility, the true marks of mastery."
This is the core of the Accelerated Expertise framework (Crandall, Klein and Hoffman, 2006; Fadde and Klein, 2010). Experts become experts by meeting the same kind of situation many times from different angles. That depth of exposure lets them handle familiar situations quickly and effortlessly, and face new or tricky ones with confidence rather than improvisation.
It is also why Skillgym trains in circuits rather than single scenarios. A circuit is a set of scenarios that practice the same skills from multiple perspectives. A pricing-negotiation circuit, for instance, might start with a cost-conscious buyer, continue with a value-focused executive and end with a committee decision: the same core situation, different dynamics. Trainees are forced to adapt their approach rather than repeat a formula, and they build the pattern recognition that lets them read the room. In weeks, not years.
Rejection resilience and tolerance to frustration
Every participant agreed that sales excellence requires emotional strength. Michael Faje, an experienced training leader, pointed to a specific population: "Many technical experts turned sales reps struggle because they're not used to rejection. They move from being 'the good guy' in hospitals to facing constant no's, and that can break them."
Can something like emotional strength be trained? There was some skepticism in the room. Elena Ciani connected the question to psychology: "Tolerance to frustration can be trained. Frustration tolerance is tied to self-efficacy, the belief in one's ability to succeed. When people believe they can handle challenges, frustration drops. When they doubt themselves, it grows."
This is Albert Bandura's theory of self-efficacy (1977, 1986, 1997). Mastery experiences, actually succeeding at something difficult, are the strongest way to build confidence. In training terms: replicate the real challenge, let people succeed and fail at it safely, and give feedback that makes progress visible.
Paolo Gentileschi from Edwards framed the practical consequence: "Discipline often precedes motivation. You may not feel like going to the gym, but if you start and see results, motivation follows. It's the same for learning: structure and follow-up help people keep going."
In Skillgym, the moments of rejection are designed into the scenarios: characters who say no, push back, lose interest. What builds resilience is not the rejection itself but what happens after it. The trainee assesses their own performance, then hears from the character how the conversation felt from the other side, then reads a debrief that connects each move to its effect. Repeated across a bootcamp, this loop turns a painful experience into a familiar one. The character's account describes the character's reaction, as the scenario shaped it; the trainee's own emotions remain theirs, to reflect on, never something the system measures.
Passion-driven performance and cultural consistency
As the conversation moved on, Edwin Simons from Teleflex brought it back to something fundamental: "Passion makes the difference. It's what keeps people pushing when everything else fails."
Where does that passion come from, and what sustains it? Tanja Feldmueller reflected: "People don't leave companies; they leave managers. To keep a positive mindset, culture must support learning and openness, especially in times of regulatory pressure."
Consistency emerged as the shared theme. Cultural values become drivers of performance when they are translated into measurable, actionable behaviors. Elena Ciani closed the loop: "Self-efficacy grows in the right environment. If you only get negative feedback, confidence collapses. Culture must sustain people's sense of capability."
Cognitive Transformation Theory (Klein and Baxter, 2009) describes the mechanism: when learners connect purpose, practice and feedback that shows them improving, they stop experiencing excellence as an instruction and start experiencing it as part of who they are.
At Skillgym we often say that methodology eats technology for breakfast. AI and digital tools can accelerate learning, but without a human-centered, neuroscience-grounded method, technology alone does not change behavior. Passion, culture and lived consistency do.
Conclusions
The Brussels roundtable made one thing clear: sales excellence in MedTech can be accelerated, not by shortcuts but by smarter, more human training.
Train the complexity, so people learn to read the room instead of reciting. Design rejection into practice, so self-efficacy grows where it is tested. Build a culture that sustains capability, so what people practice becomes who they are.
As a company that has worked on this problem for nearly two decades, our belief is unchanged: invest in people, strengthen their self-efficacy, and give them a safe place to practice complex conversations until the real ones feel familiar.
References
- Bandura, A. (1977). Self-efficacy: Toward a unifying theory of behavioral change. Psychological Review, 84(2), 191–215.
- Bandura, A. (1986). Social foundations of thought and action: A social cognitive theory. Prentice-Hall.
- Bandura, A. (1997). Self-efficacy: The exercise of control. W.H. Freeman.
- Crandall, B., Klein, G., & Hoffman, R. (2006). Working Minds: A Practitioner's Guide to Cognitive Task Analysis. MIT Press.
- Fadde, P. J., & Klein, G. A. (2010). Deliberate performance: Accelerating expertise in natural settings. Performance Improvement Quarterly, 23(1), 7–24.
- Klein, G. (1998). Sources of power: How people make decisions. MIT Press.
- Klein, G., & Baxter, H. C. (2009). Cognitive transformation theory: Contrasting cognitive and behavioral learning. In The PSI Handbook of Virtual Environments for Training and Education, Vol. 1. Praeger.
- Renkl, A., Mandl, H., & Gruber, H. (1996). Inert knowledge: Analyses and remedies. Educational Psychologist, 31(2), 115–121.
- Schwartz, D. L., Bransford, J. D., & Sears, D. (2005). Efficiency and innovation in transfer. In Transfer of Learning from a Modern Multidisciplinary Perspective (pp. 1–51). Information Age Publishing.