Stop coaching to the average

TL;DR

Most sales coaching is about averages. The playbook, the framework, the model call. But great performance doesn't live at the average — it lives in the specific things your best reps do that nobody else on the team has been taught to do. The only way to find those things is to get specific enough to actually see them.

The Full Take

Most sales coaching is coaching to the playbook.

And the playbook is the average. It's the cleaned-up version of what good looks like, distilled from a hundred calls, stripped of the specific moments that actually made the difference. It's what we teach because it's teachable. Because you can put it in a slide deck and run everyone through it.

But here's the thing about averages: your top rep isn't doing average things. They're doing specific things. Things nobody named. Things that aren't in the deck.

I've been thinking about this a lot lately. The best managers I've worked with didn't coach to the model — they coached to the moment. They'd listen to a call and say "right there, at the 14-minute mark, when the prospect said 'I'll think about it' — what did you do?" Not a general conversation about how to handle stalls. A specific conversation about what happened in that call, at that moment, with that buyer.

That kind of coaching is harder. It requires actually listening to calls, not just reviewing pipeline. It requires knowing your top performers well enough to notice what they do, not just that they do well. And it requires being honest enough to admit that the playbook doesn't explain the gap between your best reps and everyone else.

Here's an exercise that changed how I think about this.

Pick your top rep. Listen to three of their discovery calls back to back. Write down every specific behavior — not "good rapport," but the actual things they do. How long they wait after asking a question. How they respond when the prospect says "I'll think about it." Whether they repeat the prospect's exact words back. What they do when there's silence.

Then listen to three calls from a mid-performer. Compare the lists.

I guarantee you'll find at least two or three things your top rep does consistently that nobody else on your team knows about. Not because they're hiding it — because nobody ever asked them to name it.

That list? That's your real coaching playbook.

Not the one in the onboarding deck. The one that's been sitting in your call recordings the whole time, invisible because nobody looked closely enough.

The average tells you where people end up. The specific tells you how they got there. One of those is actually useful for coaching.