Dean Rohrer/theispot.com
Across industries, companies are investing heavily in radical innovations, such as new software layers for traditional hardware, AI-powered industrial tools, and smart services that promise to transform how customers create value. Yet, when these offerings reach the market, sales pipelines often stall. Salesforce, for example, struggled with the early commercialization of a radical innovation launched in 2016: Einstein, an AI add-on to the Salesforce CRM system.
Managers often assume that the problem stems from customers’ risk aversion or the product’s limited technical maturity. Our research points to a human factor on the supplier side: sales professionals’ fear of losing face when discussing something radically new.
This is not the usual fear of rejection in sales. It is a subtle, self-conscious feeling that undermines confidence and performance just when the company requires them most.
How the Fear of Losing Face Holds Salespeople Back
In the research article “Selling Radical Innovations,” coauthored with Julian Schmalstieg and Andreas Eggert and published in Industrial Marketing Management last October, we examine highly innovative products that lagged behind expectations. To that end, we interviewed 69 sales executives, salespeople, and customers from three global manufacturers and surveyed 400 managers from a diverse sample of industrial manufacturers.
We found that when products are radically new, salespeople experience a distinct fear of appearing incompetent to customers. This stems from their anticipation of consultation failures, such as giving incorrect information, being unable to answer questions, or making promises the company cannot yet keep.
These worries lead to hesitation, resulting in salespeople avoiding deep conversations, retreating from new opportunities, and relying on established offerings they can confidently explain.
Success in sales has traditionally relied on a salesperson’s expertise. Salespeople learn the product inside and out, become knowledgeable about how to solve problems, and exude confidence.
But this dynamic changes when it comes to selling radical innovations. For reasons we will outline below, traditional approaches for sales training are less effective with radical innovations, and salespeople instead need to trade authority for curiosity, learn alongside customers, and coordinate with experts rather than aim to project mastery. That shift allows them to benefit from engaging with specialists early in the sales process and creating dialogues in which not every answer is known.
But that shift also challenges sales professionals’ conceptions of their identities. We found that the fear of losing face peaked among salespeople who maintain high expectations of themselves (“I should know everything about what I sell”), resist change, and lack job experience. Ironically, salespeople who have been top performers in the past often struggle more than others in selling novel products.
Although fear of losing face may sound like a delicate emotional issue, our data shows that it poses a significant and quantifiable business risk. Across two studies of nearly 400 industrial salespeople, this fear consistently reduced innovation-selling performance, even when we controlled for factors such as experience, self-expectations, change readiness, relationships, and company standing. Those who feared appearing unprepared were less likely to pursue complex opportunities or engage with unfamiliar buyer groups.
We observed the same phenomenon at a global manufacturer that had launched an AI-based maintenance platform. Despite strong interest from customers, sales momentum lagged. The issue was not technical; it was psychological. Many salespeople hesitated to schedule demos with IT-oriented buyers, fearing an inability to respond confidently to detailed questions.
However, when the company paired sales reps with technical specialists and provided use cases for customer problems, adoption rates increased. The lesson is that radically new products require new sales structures.
Why Traditional Sales Enablement Falls Short — and What Works Instead
Most companies respond to slow innovation sales with more product training, assuming that more knowledge equals more confidence. So did the three companies we studied, until management realized that the training was not working.
Traditional sales training assumes that product knowledge can be fully transferred to the salesperson. However, radical innovations are often so complex that salespeople cannot always fully grasp everything there is to know about them. For example, interview participants frequently pointed to software innovations incorporating predictive analytics, artificial intelligence, and functionality that extends beyond the manufacturer’s own equipment. In these situations, rather than fully closing salespeople’s knowledge gaps, training sessions often make them painfully aware of what they do not know.
What salespeople need is not merely more information but the conditions that enable consultative or value-based selling. Top performers succeed not by reciting features but by exploring customer problems and mobilizing resources.
One of the most effective moves companies can make in this respect is to redefine what it means to sell such radical new products. The best companies we studied reframed the salesperson’s role from expert to orchestrator. Instead of mastering every technical detail, sellers became door openers who connected customers with the right specialists and guided the adoption journey. Customers saw transparency and collaboration rather than insecurity, and trust rose accordingly.
Leaders reinforced this shift by normalizing learning in front of customers and aligning incentives. Recognition went to shared successes rather than solo wins, and learning and customer engagement were emphasized in the early stages of projects. The company discovered that when collaboration becomes the expectation, the fear of losing face diminishes.
Three Levers for Selling the New
Our work points to three concrete levers that leaders can apply to help their teams — and their customers — embrace radical innovations.
1. Build consultation support. Fear thrives when individuals are isolated. Salespeople feel safer when they have immediate access to expertise and case studies. The best-in-class companies we studied provide their sales teams with these supports:
- Expert tandems. Each salesperson is paired with a technical or product specialist who can participate in meetings in the early stages of selling the new product.
- Usable knowledge assets. Concise interview guides, customer personas, and short use-case narratives are developed for salespeople’s use.
- Customer segmentation. Rather than segmenting by traditional customer types, the focus is on identifying customer groups facing similar problems. Messaging is tailored around those cases.
- Fast-response channels. Digital “ask an expert” tools or internal chat groups are established to provide sellers with immediate answers during conversations with customers.
These resources can reduce the risk of consultation failures and the resultant anxiety that erodes initiative. In our interviews, managers noted that when sales teams had access to experts on short notice, they were more willing to initiate conversations about new solutions.
2. Select and develop readiness for change. Success when selling a radical innovation depends less on product knowledge than on adaptability and curiosity. Organizations thrive by identifying and developing people who view uncertainty as an opportunity. This begins with recruiting for learning agility and openness to new experiences, and continues with coaching and peer learning supported by leaders who foster shared learning across all levels.
In one company, we observed that innovation sales teams met monthly to share what had gone wrong in pilot projects. Instead of punishing failure, leadership encouraged reflection on lessons learned. Over time, those sessions fostered a sense of psychological safety and shared experimentation. The result was greater self-confidence among salespeople and faster adoption across customer segments, as well as practical guidance for sellers on how to approach customers when problems arose.
3. Redefine the role of sales. For decades, the sales culture in many of the companies we studied had rewarded mastery. Radical innovation requires a culture of learning. Leaders should clarify that the goal in the early stages of selling is to help customers make sense of something new, not to deliver scripted certainty. That message needs to be reinforced through processes: shared performance metrics between sales and product teams, joint recognition for cocreated wins, and the early involvement of marketing and engineering employees in customer conversations. When incentives signal that collaboration is valued, salespeople can drop the pretense of omniscience and instead focus on acquiring a deeper understanding of customer workflows, uncovering challenges, and helping customers navigate risk.
Leading by Example
Executives play a decisive role in shaping how their organizations sell innovation, and the behaviors they model spread quickly.
When leaders personally participate in early-stage customer meetings, acknowledge what the company is still figuring out, and demonstrate curiosity, they legitimize openness throughout the sales force.
At one manufacturer we studied, the head of sales joined the initial discussions about the company’s first digital platform offering. Instead of insisting on certainty, he told customers, “We’re exploring this together.” His presence reframed the tone from selling to co-learning, and his team’s willingness to initiate similar conversations increased measurably the following quarter.
Leadership also matters for resourcing. Budgets for enablement, training, and coaching should receive the same priority as R&D spending. Innovation cannot scale if the people responsible for bringing it to market lack the support to do so confidently.
Customers also feel exposed when adopting something new. Offering pilot projects with clear metrics, using staged commitments, and keeping sales involved through early implementation phases reduces customers’ uncertainty about the decisions they have to make. These tactics not only reassure customers but also reduce the psychological pressure on salespeople, making every interaction feel less like a test and more like a partnership.
The central insight from our research: Success in selling the unknown comes when companies design for curiosity, not perfection.
When sellers fear losing face, innovation stalls. When they are supported to explore new products freely, innovation scales. The task for leaders is to replace a culture of perfection with one of learning, collaboration, and confidence.