This paper examines the case of sales departments of two companies that, driven by concerns over sales practices being dependent on individual ability and the resulting difficulty in training junior staff, enrolled in the same training program and undertook reforms that included standardizing their sales activities; however, they achieved sharply divergent outcomes. Company A focused on developing a sales kata and using role-playing exercises to master it; as a result, employees began to conduct their sales activities in line with standardized business processes instead of relying on individual experience and know-how. Company B focused on developing and disseminating detailed standardized operating procedures (SOPs); although there were short-term gains, the standard method failed to gain traction and a sales style dependent on individual skill persisted. These cases suggest that in complex operations such as sales, creating and mastering a kata, which functions as an exemplar while allowing for variation, is more effective than producing SOPs for promoting a standard method and embedding it as a new routine.