The leader is the script

A sales team talks the way its manager talks.

I learned this listening to call recordings. I would hear a rep hedge at price and it would bother me. A week later I would catch myself doing the same thing in a meeting. Not about price. About a schedule change, or a policy nobody liked. Same hedge. Same softening. Sorry to do this to you guys, but.

They were not copying my words. They were copying my posture under pressure, which is the only part that actually transfers.

If you want reps who state a price and then stop talking, you have to be a person who states a decision and then stops talking. If you apologize for the comp plan they will apologize for the price. If you roll out a change like you are bracing for the reaction, they will present options like they are bracing for the reaction.

This is uncomfortable, because it means the training problem is sometimes a you problem and there is no curriculum for that.

What helped me was listening to myself the way I listened to them. I sent the same report every morning for five years. Somewhere in year two I started reading my own sentences before I hit send and cutting the hedges. Not for style. Because the people reading it were going to sound like it.

You can run role play every week and still teach the opposite of what you are drilling, just in how you open the meeting.