Is it true that 87% of sales training is forgotten within 30 days?

There is no research behind that number. It is usually credited to Xerox in the 1980s, but from my research no such study exists: no publication, no sample size, no methodology, no author. Every citation leads to another vendor's blog rather than to a document. Unreinforced learning does decay quickly, which is why the claim sounds right, but the specific figure is unsupported and should not be used in a deck a CFO might check.

What research on the forgetting curve is actually credible?

Murre and Dros published a replication of Ebbinghaus in PLOS ONE in 2015, measuring retention at intervals from 20 minutes to 31 days. It is open access and holds up. One caveat the vendor decks skip: Ebbinghaus memorized nonsense syllables, which is not the same as learning a selling skill that connects to what a seller already knows. The research gives you the shape of decay, steep and early, rather than a percentage you can apply to your training budget.

If the statistic is wrong, why does sales training still stop working?

Because reinforcement stops. Take one manager, count their sellers, count the discovery calls those sellers ran last month, then count the coaching conversations about a specific call the manager had actually reviewed. For most teams that last number is single digits against a hundred or more calls. Reviewing one call has always cost about an hour, so coaching gets rationed, cancelled when the quarter gets loud, and drifts into pipeline review when it does happen.

What outcomes should sales enablement expect from better reinforcement?

Competence first, then confidence, then the deal metrics. Sellers who get specific feedback on every call start asking harder questions, which shows up first as better qualification, then as first-meeting conversion, then as shorter cycles and larger deals because a quantified problem supports a bigger solution. The risk profile changes too: 40% to 60% of qualified deals end in no decision, and the discovery behaviors that reinforcement builds are exactly what resolves buyer indecision. Build the business case on additional qualified opportunities per seller against program cost, using your own numbers.

How do you decide whether a sales enablement tool will actually get used?

Judge it by time cost rather than feature list. Ask what it requires a seller to do and how long that takes on a Tuesday in month six. Anything over about five minutes per instance gets used enthusiastically for a few weeks and then quietly abandoned, because it competes with pipeline and pipeline wins. This is why AI role-play platforms show a usage cliff around month two or three. Adoption is a function of the time cost of the behavior.

How RGA Works

Platform

Meeting Prepper Agent Discovery Conversion Agent Solution Proposal Agent

CRM Integrations

Salesforce HubSpot

Who RGA Serves

SDR & BDR Agencies SaaS & High-Tech Companies Professional Services Private Equity & VC Sales Consulting Enablement & Training Teams

Security Insights About Us RGA in the News

The figure 87% in outline, struck through in orange, above the words "The number that never had a source"

The 87% Sales Training Myth: What Actually Happens After the Training Ends

Ai Sales Coaching

August 24, 2026

Custom HTML/CSS/JavaScript

Matt Oess

Matt Oess is the founder and CEO of Revenue Growth Agent, an AI-native sales execution platform for B2B sales teams. He is a B2B sales and revenue growth executive with more than 20 years of experience, having led B2B sales transformation initiatives involving Cisco, Infor, and GE Digital. He has also served for 14 years as a partner at TechCXO, a management consulting firm that supplies B2B tech companies with fractional and interim executives. Oess holds a Master of Business Administration from the Yale School of Management.

Back to Blog