# We Almost Built the Wrong Tool for Our Sales Team > The whole company agreed our salespeople needed better materials and better routes. A small team went and found out what they actually needed, and it wasn't... Published: 2026-06-20 · Updated: 2026-06-23 · Topics: Product Strategy & Development, Sales Enablement, AI & Machine Learning, Data & Analytics · Author: Alan Wizemann When a company decides that its sales force could be doing better, the proposed fix is almost always the same thing, and it's almost always delivered with total confidence. Better materials. Better routes. A nicer app, fresher collateral, smarter sequencing of the day. Everyone in the room nods along, because it feels like obvious, self-evident help, the kind of thing nobody bothers to argue with. We had a small team go and dig into it properly before we committed to building anything (across six or seven different markets, actually watching reps work) and they came back and told the organization something it genuinely did not expect to hear. The routes are fine, it turned out, and the salespeople already know their customers cold – they are experts in their own neighborhoods, and the last thing they need is a map. Better materials wouldn't move the needle at all, because materials simply weren't the gap in the first place. The gap was knowing exactly what to say in the few minutes they had, face to face, about the specific products they needed to move that particular week. That's a very different problem from the one everyone in the building had already agreed we had. And if the team hadn't gone out and actually checked, we'd have happily spent a year and a great deal of money building beautiful sales materials that solved precisely nothing. So instead they built something deliberately small, the kind of thing you could describe in a sentence, and we ended up calling them sales stories. About five minutes before a rep walks into an account, they get a brief – here are the products to focus on for this specific customer, here's what each one will actually do for that customer's business, and here are a couple of versions of the pitch, with an alternate ready in case the first one doesn't land. The rep isn't digging through some system trying to remember the last conversation, or checking a quota, or hunting for anything. It's just this: you're walking into this account right now, here's what to say, and here are a few different ways to say it. What made the whole thing work, in the end, wasn't the writing itself at all. It was that we were sitting on a pile of data nobody had ever really used for anything, and every one of the stories was built directly out of it. Here's my favorite example, the one I keep telling. There was a store sitting right next door to an Irish pub, and the store didn't happen to carry a particular Irish whiskey at all. We knew that pub's volume on that exact whiskey, because the pub was a customer of ours too, and so the sales story practically wrote itself off that one fact. People are walking out of that pub having just been drinking this stuff, and some real number of them want to take a bottle home with them, and you, the store right next door, don't have it on the shelf – so there's a genuine chance they buy something else, or just walk out empty-handed. The rep brought exactly that to the store owner, who had honestly never once made the connection himself, and the first order was a case or two, because the owner reasonably wanted to prove it out before he believed any of it. A week later he was back asking for more, which is the entire point. That, right there, is the whole difference between a sales story and a sales pitch. We weren't warm-pitching some stale generic idea, the tired old "you should really carry this." We were saying something specific and grounded: the bar next door is moving a lot of this, here's roughly what you'd move yourself, and here's what to pull off your shelf that isn't selling to make the room for it. The generic version of this exact move falls flat in about four seconds flat, which is precisely why so much sales enablement quietly fails. If a rep walks in and says "you need this," and the owner just says "I already carry it" or "I tried that, it didn't move," you've burned credibility that you genuinely do not get back, certainly not on that visit. So the stories had to account for the obvious objections up front – where do I even put it, my shelves are already full, my back room is full – using real business metrics and the real constraints that one specific customer actually faces. It wasn't a script you read off. It was an informed conversation that the rep was now equipped to actually have, on equal footing, which is a different thing entirely. The honest truth of it is that this is the same trick good salespeople and good consultants have always quietly run, just made systematic and handed to everybody. Five minutes before a meeting I'll figure out what the person across the table actually cares about, what I should be careful not to bring up, and what I should lead with, and then I weave all of that into how I talk to them. Everyone who's genuinely good at this does some private version of it in their head. What the team really did was take that talent, which used to live in a few people's heads and nowhere else, and make it automatic and available to every rep on every single call. There's a structural lesson buried in how the thing actually got built, too, and it's the part I'd most want to underline for anyone. It was a small team, around eleven people, and they owned the whole outcome end to end, with no handoffs and no committee. They launched it in a high-velocity test market, the kind of place where you find out fast and unambiguously whether something works or doesn't, and it drove double-digit growth. And when leadership asked them what they needed to scale the thing up, the answer wasn't more headcount, which is what leadership half-expected. It was: leave the team intact, and let them keep evolving the product. A tool like this one does not get better by bolting eighty-five more people onto it. It gets better by staying close to the reps and constantly adapting to what's actually landing in real accounts. But none of it, not one piece of it, would have existed if the team had simply accepted the consensus answer at the start. The whole company was completely sure the problem was materials and routes, and the only reason it turned out not to be is that nobody who was sure had actually gone and watched what happens in the fifteen minutes a rep spends standing inside a store. The team went and did exactly that, and the real problem looked nothing whatsoever like the obvious one everyone had agreed on. That's become the pattern I've learned to genuinely distrust over the years – the precise moment when everyone in the room agrees on the fix, confidently, before a single person has talked to the people who actually do the work. That agreement feels an awful lot like alignment in the moment. Usually, though, it's just a shared assumption that nobody has bothered to test against reality. So if your sales numbers are soft, resist the very strong urge to go print better brochures. Go find out, firsthand, what your best reps actually lack at the precise moment of the conversation, standing in the doorway. Most of the time it isn't materials, and it isn't routes; it's knowing exactly what to say, to this one specific customer, standing in this one doorway, right now. That's a data problem wearing a sales problem's clothes, and the only way you ever come to see it for what it actually is, is if you go out and look at the work instead of agreeing about it in a room. --- Canonical: https://alanwizemann.com/articles/we-almost-built-the-wrong-tool-for-our-sales-team