Actual Veggies is on a hot streak. After launching in 2021, the veggie burger brand claimed the No. 561 spot on the 2025 Inc. 5000 list, making it one of the fastest-growing small businesses in the U.S. Its leaders say they expect to top $20 million in sales this year.
But according to co-founder and co-CEO Jason Rosenbaum, the company doesn’t offer formal sales training to its sales team, which consists of two employees focused on selling to food service buyers such as restaurants and hospitals, plus two more focused on retail clients and grocery stores.
“Our team isn’t large enough to justify that yet,” Rosenbaum tells Inc. “Our philosophy, which has worked well for us thus far, has been to hire already industry-experienced salespeople and immerse them directly into our culture, products and mission.”
It may sound surprising, but Actual Veggies isn’t alone. On Inc.’s latest CEO Survey, which polled the leaders of America’s fastest-growing small businesses, just over half of respondents (50.3 percent) said they don’t offer formal training to their salespeople.
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It’s a trend that surprised several academics who study sales. Colleen McClure—an assistant professor in the University of Alabama at Birmingham’s department of marketing, industrial distribution and economics—says she was “very shocked” to hear about the survey data.
“Most of the roles that our students go into, it’s a formal sales position with training,” McClure says, adding that companies may be assuming their hires already learned basic sales skills in school. “Most of the training nowadays from our companies is less on the process of how to sell it, versus, ‘Here’s what you’re selling; here’s your customers; go do it.’ They don’t necessarily teach them the process of how to ask questions or handle objections.”
Rhett Epler, an assistant professor in the Old Dominion University marketing department, says it’s common for salespeople to get on-the-ground practice while selling to actual customers, but “that’s not how somebody should be learning.”
“I’ve worked in sales, and I had absolutely no training whatsoever,” Epler adds. “It was pretty painful for everybody involved, including customers…There’s a lot of really good sales research that points to sales training being very effective and helping to do really nice things for people in terms of longevity and [increasing] their basic effectiveness.”
For Actual Veggies, the decision to not offer formal sales training had to do with the nature of selling packaged foodstuffs.
“It’s less about knowing the product, and it’s more about knowing the grocery store,” co-founder and co-CEO Hailey Swartz says of her company’s market. “Instead of having this formal sales process that we put in place, it was important to find people that had experience selling into the grocery stores and knew the intricacies that, like, ‘Whole Foods is going to expect X amount of dollars to promote.’”
Adds Rosenbaum: “Something you hear in our industry is: ‘The easy part is selling into the stores. The hard part is staying on the shelves.’”
Bryce McConville—founder and CEO of another fast-growing Inc. 5000 company, the running shorts purveyor ChicknLegs (No. 649)–says he doesn’t offer formal sales training, either.
“We’ve been growing quickly and haven’t done a ton of cold calls to retailers who don’t already know who we are,” says McConville, who employs three full-time sales reps and then handles some large accounts himself. “Because of that, our sales roles have felt more like account management roles in the last one-to-two years. As we go after new categories, that will definitely change and we will have a greater need for hard sales skills among our team.”
New hires at ChicknLegs already do practice calls, review brand information and learn how to respond to common customer rebuttals, McConville says—but he distinguishes that from formal training about negotiation strategies or how to close a deal.
Of course, if slightly more than half of CEO Survey respondents said they don’t offer formal sales training, that means just under half still do. Jeff Lee, CEO and co-founder of the makeup brand DIBS Beauty (No. 219 on the Inc. 5000), says he views formal training as “a must” for his sales team of more than 150 contractors.
“We take the view that the interactions customers have with every one of our sales team members are formative to their long-term relationship with DIBS,” Lee explains. “CPG brands live and die by their product efficacy and their brand image, and effectively conveying and advancing both requires regular training.”
Of the CEO Survey respondents that did report offering their sales teams formal training, 85.2 percent said it had to do with product specs and selling points; 83.1 percent said it concerned general sales skills; and 73.4 percent said it was specific to a certain sales or CRM platform.
For some fast-growing brands, sales training isn’t a concern. Deanne Buck, CEO of the underwear brand Branywyn (No. 246 on the Inc. 5000), says that since her company uses a direct-to-consumer model, they don’t have a sales team in the first place.
However, she adds, if there ever were to be a Branywyn sales team, she would “DEFINITELY offer them training.”